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//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]

SABG

Noticeboard

Dates

  • SABG members are invited to join the NAAS visit to the Lachenalia collection in the Five Arrows Gallery and the glasshouses at Exbury Gardens, SO45 1AZ on Saturday 18th March 2023 at 10.30am for tea and biscuits and 11:00am for the Gallery opening. Further details at http://www.nerineandamaryllidsociety.co.uk/forthcoming-events
  • The SABG Spring 2023 meeting will be on Sunday 2nd April 2023, at Badger’s Farm Community Centre, Winchester. In the morning, Paul Lewis will speak on his work breeding hardy Gladiolus hybrids, and in the afternoon Paul Cumbleton will give the second part of his planned series of talks “Sorting out the Massonias” and Rodney Sims will show a video “Wildflower Extravaganza”, with magnificent scenes of South African flowers together with close-ups of named species. See Spring 2023 meeting for more details.
  • For NAAS members, on Wednesday 26th April Paul Cumbleton will give a Zoom talk on “Nerines & Other Amaryllids in My Bulb Collection”.
  • The following SABG meeting has been provisionally booked for Sunday 22nd October 2023. More details will follow.

News

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 Auction of books (14 March 2023)
  • SABG Joint orders, request for Haemanthus material, and Exbury Nerines video (11 November 2022)
  • SABG Joint orders to seed and bulb suppliers in South Africa (7 November 2022)
  • SABG Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange 2022 list (7 November 2022)

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 2023 meeting

Our next meeting will be on Sunday 2nd April 2023. In the morning, Paul Lewis will speak on his work breeding hardy Gladiolus hybrids, and in the afternoon Paul Cumbleton will give the second part of his planned series of talks “Sorting out the Massonias” and Rodney Sims will show a video “Wildflower Extravaganza”, with magnificent scenes of South African flowers together with close-ups of named species.

Directions to the meeting hall. The doors will open at 10.00, and the meeting will close at about 14.30.

→ Read more...

More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.

Keep calm & grow bulbs

Other meetings

  • Saturday in March 2023: Lachenalia visit day
  • Saturday in October 2023: 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

  • The latest newsletter is number 47 (October 2022). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.

Further information

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), 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.

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

[Copyright © 2023 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]

start.txt · Last modified: 20:29 16/03/2023 by Richard White