Southern African Bulb Group
www.sabg.tk
Spring meeting
Sunday 11th March 2012, Winchester, UK. See below for more information.Next meeting
The Spring meeting of the Group will be on Sunday 11th March 2012, at Badger Farm Community Centre, Winchester, from 10:00 a.m. to approximately 4:30 p.m. There will be slides, talks, plant sales, and refreshments. All who are interested in growing these plants will be welcome.Directions to the meeting hall
- Directions by road: Leave the M3 at junction 11 and proceed towards Winchester. At the first roundabout follow the sign to Winchester. At the second roundabout take the second exit up the hill towards Oliver's Battery and Badger Farm. At the third roundabout take the fourth exit to the superstore (Sainsbury's, not the third exit marked Badger Farm). Follow the road right round the edge of the car park until you see the doctor's surgery. Next to it is the Badger Farm Community Centre. Signs may warn you of a three-hour parking limit. However, Community Centre users are exempt, but make sure you add your car registration number to the list in the hall, to avoid being charged for over-staying the limit.
- The post code is SO22 4QB for those with satellite navigation.
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MAPS:
- Map of the location, courtesy of Google Maps (you can scroll around, change scale, etc.)
- Another map which is more like a road atlas, thanks to Streetmap.co.uk (look for the orange arrow pointing to the meeting place, and take the unlabelled road from the roundabout)
- Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map showing the access roads from the M3
News
Please send me your suggestions for additions and improvements.
Southern African Bulb Group newsletters
(Note that these are Word documents, not web pages. Depending on your web browser settings, your brower may offer to download them for you and either save them on disc or open them in Word. If this doesn't work, try clicking with the right mouse button and select "Save Link As..." (Firefox) or "Save Target As..." (Internet Explorer).
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Other newsletters
By kind permission of IBSA, copies of their newsletters are sent to SABG members by email.About the Group
The Southern African Bulb Group was initiated by a group of enthusiasts on April 4th 2004. The objective of the 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, including `dicots' such as Oxalis.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.
Many of these plants come from the former Cape Province, 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 winter growers in South Africa. A few 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 was initiated by Stefan Rau and Terry Smale as an informal group to provide a forum for exchange of information between members about these plants and their cultivation. This is by means of meetings in members' gardens and in meeting halls and by distribution of a newsletter electronically or by conventional mail. Further information is available from Audrey Cain (see below).
Contacts
To join the group, or to enquire about joining:
Audrey Cain
Email: audrey@cain.net
To enquire about the newsletter or to submit items for inclusion:
David Victor
Email: dxvictor@btinternet.com
Phone: 01984 667250
To enquire about the web site or to submit items for inclusion:
Richard White
Email: sabg@rjwhite.tk
Further information
- Announcement about the formation of the Group in the The African Garden
- A copy of the announcement above
- Dates of SABG meetings past, present and future
Related web sites
- Amaryllidaceae.org (in French)
- A-Z Photographic Database of Southern African Bulbous Plants
- BulbWeb (Audrey Cain's web site containing useful information on bulbs grown over the years)
- Cape Seed & Bulb (Jim Holmes near Cape Town, who has been growing and supplying S.African bulbs for more than 30 years, world wide)
- IBSA (Indigenous Bulb Association of South Africa, Inheemse Bolplant Vereniging van Suid-Afrika)
- International Bulb Society
- Nerine & Amaryllid Society
- Pacific Bulb Society (PBS)
- Société Française des Iris et plantes Bulbeuses (some of the pages are available in English)
- Telos Rare Bulbs (primarily a California nursery, but their web-site has names and pictures of many species)
- Terry Smale's web site
- The African Garden (culture, photography, identification, research, horticultural promotion and conservation of Southern African Bulbs and their hybrids, by David Fenwick)
Lachenalia pustulata photographed just outside my conservatory, where I grow a few Lachenalias and other South African bulbs. It was supposed to be a collection of cacti and other succulent plants, but the bulbs are beginning to take over ... (I really must remember to water them!)
We are the Southern African Bulb group,
but this is possibly the most southern African bulb group ...
Three plants of Haemanthus coccineus photographed by Richard White in April 2006.
(Can you see the third?)
These plants were growing in a very stony soil at Cape L'Agulhas,
the southernmost point of the continent of Africa,
within a few yards of both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean
(or so it said on the notice nearby).
Nerine filifolia photographed by Richard White in April 2006
in the new conservatory at Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town.