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

SABG

Noticeboard

(for more details on some of these items, go to the “News items” section below)

  • Newsletter no. 40 (August 2019) is now available.
  • Our next meeting is on Sunday 29th March 2020 in Farnham, UK – details below.
  • The SABG meetings in 2020 will be on Sunday 29th March (at Hale Institute Village Hall, near Farnham, Surrey) and Sunday 11th October. James Hitchmough will give two talks at the latter meeting. More details will follow later when they are available.
  • SABG Members: do we have your correct email address? Newsletter no. 40 was sent on 26th August to all SABG members whose email addresses we have. If you are a member and didn’t receive it, please email Richard White (see “Contacts” on this page).

Spring 2024 meeting

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.

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

Other meetings

  • Saturday 16th 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.

Further information

News items

  • 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]

Latest newsletters

  • The latest newsletter is number 40 (August 2019). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.

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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.

More about the SABG

About the SABG web site

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.

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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.
  • 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.tk.

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

start.1570536005.txt.gz · Last modified: 12:00 08/10/2019 by Richard White