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Our next meeting will be on Sunday 24th March 2024.
The speaker for this meeting is Timothy Walker. He is a very well known speaker, his lectures renowned for being both informative but also highly entertaining. He was formerly the Director of Oxford Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum, which under his leadership won four gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Currently he is a lecturer in Plant Sciences at Oxford University. His website gives a lot more details, including some video if you want to see examples of him speaking. He will give a talk called “From Diaz to Diamonds - Plant Hunting in South Africa”. “The western Cape region of South Africa is one of the most botanically diverse areas of the World.
This takes a route from the southernmost tip of Africa to the border with Namibia looking at the plants and the ethnobotany of one of the most fascinating countries in the World.” While not specifically about bulbs, it would I’m sure be very interesting as it could help us see the broader ecological context in which our bulbs grow in the wild.
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.
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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.
The SABG web-site started in October 2006. In April 2018, a new version of the SABG web site was established, which is intended to contain all the information from the original SABG web site (which will remain available for a while, but will not be updated). The URL (location, address) at which the web site can be found has not changed. It is www.sabg.uk or just sabg.uk. The software used to manage the web site is DokuWiki. It is a secure web-site. If your web browser says it isn’t, go to https://sabg.uk. Information about our compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can be found in our Privacy Policy.
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).
[Copyright © 2023 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]