Noticeboard
On Sunday 28th March 2021 we have arranged a virtual meeting at 2pm using the Zoom online video-conferencing software. This should allow anyone with a computer, laptop, tablet or smart-phone to participate. An Internet connection will be required (which you presumably have if you are reading this!) and preferably also a microphone and video-camera (often combined and sometimes called a webcam) if you wish to say something. These are built into smartphones, most tablets and many laptops, and can be plugged into desktop computers.
Jon Evans will show the second part of his talk on “Plants seen at AGS shows” for our Zoom meeting at 2pm. This will be a chance for all those members who can’t normally travel to our meetings in person to join in. Jon gave us the first part of his talk at our last physical meeting on 6 October 2019 in Winchester. We will email details of the link to join the talk nearer the time.
More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.
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).
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), an annual bulb and seed exchange, and a newsletter with three or four issues 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.
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[Copyright © 2021 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]