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- Here is the list of bulbs and seeds available (until 16th November) in the November 2023 Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange.
- The SABG Spring meeting has been booked for Sunday 24th March 2024 and the following Autumn meeting for Sunday 20th October 2024, both at Badger’s Farm Community Centre.
- Gordon Summerfield's 2023-24 catalogue of bulbs and seeds is available. Bulletin no. 49/2 gives details of how to join a group of SABG members planning a joint order to be submitted in December 2023.
- Another member also organises joint orders to SABC, Shire Bulbs and Lifestyle Seeds, as mentioned in Bulletin no. 49/2.
- Newsletter no. 49 (August 2023) is available.
- Bulletin no. 49/3 (3 November 2023) has been emailed.
![//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]](/_detail/pict5136-680x1100.png?id=start "//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]")
Dates
- The deadline for SABG members to request bulbs and seeds from the November 2023 Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange is Thursday 16th November 2023.
- The SABG Spring 2024 meeting has been booked for Sunday 24th March 2024 and the following Autumn meeting for Sunday 20th October 2024. The latter date is a change from the provisional date of 13th October.
News
- An SABG member has drawn my attention to a study of the South African species of Ledebouria, which I have added to our Digital library [22 November 2023]
- The November 2023 Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange has now finished. The material available was listed here here. [22 November 2023]
- More options to order seeds and bulbs from South African and other suppliers are described in Bulletin 48/3 emailed to SABG members. [23 June 2023]
- An SABG member is proposing to make a joint seed order to Silverhill Seeds, as described in Bulletin 48/2 emailed to SABG members today. If you are an SABG member, didn’t receive this bulletin and are interested in joining in, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch. [10 April 2023]
Recent emails
The following emails were sent recently to all SABG members whose email addresses we have. (The dates are when the emails were sent, not the dates of any meetings or deadlines to which they might refer.) If you are a member and didn’t receive any of them, please email Richard White (see “Contacts” on this page). (If you’re not a member and are interested in what we do, see our pages About the SABG and How to join the SABG.)
- SABG Bulletin 49/3 (3 November 2023)
- SABG Bulletin 49/2 (14 October 2023)
- SABG Bulletin 49/1 (23 September 2023)
- SABG Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange list (14 September 2023)
- SABG Newsletter 49 (26 August 2023)
Remember that reasons for not receiving our emails include the following:
- You haven’t notified us of a change of email address (tell me now!)
- Your inbox is full or your total email quota has been exceeded (download and delete old emails!)
- Your email provider classifies some of our emails as “spam” (look in your “Spam” or “Junk” folder and mark our emails as “not spam”!)
- Our software encountered an error when sending
- We’ve made a mistake (these things happen!)
We made changes (on 13 April 2022) intended to reduce the likelihood of our emails being regarded as spam. Please let me know (with a copy of the email) if anything from the SABG (with the SABG’s Lachenalia logo, rather than from an individual member) ends up in your Spam or Junk email folder. Thank you.
Spring 2024 meeting
Our next meeting will be on Sunday 24th March 2024.
Speakers have not yet been arranged.
Directions to the meeting hall. The doors will open at 10.00, and the meeting will close at about 14.30. SABG members, their guests and visitors are welcome. Admission is £3.00 and parking is free.
More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.
Other meetings
- Saturday in March 2024: Lachenalia visit day
- Saturday in October 2024: Nerine visit day
- both organised by the Nerine and Amaryllid Society at the Five Arrows Gallery, Exbury Gardens, Exbury, Southampton SO45 1AX, by kind invitation of Nicholas de Rothschild and Theo Herselman. These events are for NAAS members, but SABG members are also invited; see the NAAS events page, and please inform Theo or the NAAS Secretary Alison Corley alison.corley@btinternet.com if you wish to attend so that numbers can be estimated.
Latest newsletters and bulletins
- The latest newsletter is number 49 (August 2023). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.
- The latest bulletin is number 48/3 and was emailed to members on 23 June 2023.
Further information
- Help on cultivation, using the web site, etc.
- More information about our meetings, the location and directions are shown on our About our meetings.
- More information about the Group
- We have a Google Calendar, so you can add our events to your phone or other device.
- A list of our Past, present and future meetings
- Links to other web sites including suppliers of bulbs and seeds
- We have started a Digital library
Photo gallery
I plan to include a photo gallery here. Until it is ready, why not visit Audrey Cain's BulbWeb? Her web-site, now hosted by the SABG, contains over 1,400 photographs of plants in 175 genera (not all of them are South African).
About the Group
The SABG is based in the UK and is for anyone interested in growing the beautiful and diverse bulbous plants of South Africa and neighbouring countries. You do not need to be an expert (I’m not!) or live in the UK, but our meetings have all been in England so far.
The objective of the Southern African Bulb Group is to further the understanding of the cultivation of Southern African bulbs, where ‘bulbs’ is used in the broad sense to encompass bulb-, corm- and tuber- possessing Southern African plants, which are mostly ‘monocots’ (plants with strap-like leaves and flower parts in threes or sixes) but also including ‘dicots’ (with broad leaves and frequently five-petalled flowers) such as Oxalis.
Our activities include two meetings per year with talks and plant sales (recently these have been in Winchester in southern England), one or two Bulb & Seed Exchanges per year, and three or four Newsletters per year.
Many of these plants come from the former Cape Province of South Africa, now the Northern, Western and Eastern Cape Provinces, and are easy to grow in a cool greenhouse or a sunny conservatory or window sill. They usually provide colourful flowers in autumn and winter and need a dry period in summer, because they are mostly winter growers from the winter rainfall areas of South Africa. Some are summer growers and a few of these will grow outside in southern or sheltered parts of the UK, such as Agapanthus, some Nerines and Tulbaghias, etc. Others, like Lachenalia, are real jewels to brighten up your conservatory when not much else is in flower.
For help with finding your way around, click on Help (on the sidebar, which may appear on the left of the page on computers and at the top on small devices).
Contacts
- To join the group, or to enquire about joining, email Rodney Sims rodney.sims@tiscali.co.uk. See How to join the SABG.
- To enquire about the newsletter or web site, to send suggestions for additions and improvements, or to submit items for inclusion, email Richard White richard@sabg.uk.
Discussion
The following pages have discussion entries:
| Bulb topics | 20:31 30/11/2023 | Richard White | 3 Comments |
| Hardiness of South African bulbs | 15:12 10/04/2023 | Richard White | 1 Comment |
| How to grow South African bulbs | 15:41 30/03/2023 | Richard White | 1 Comment |
[Copyright © 2023 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]
start.txt · Last modified: 21:22 03/11/2023 by Richard White
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