Monday, October 13th 2025, 7.00 PM – 8.00 PM

This well-known and the only fully hardy nerine was introduced to cultivation in the UK from the Eastern Cape of South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and described as a new species in 1904. It quickly became established as a garden plant but its popularity fuelled extensive collecting of the bulbs in the wild for export. Although still recorded from the wild around the time of the second world war it was clearly becoming rarer, and by the 1960s there were no further reports. While a second population had been discovered in the Natal Drakensberg in the 1920s, it was thought likely that the species was extinct in the Eastern Cape. A Nerine & Amaryllid Society expedition to look for it in 2015 found no evidence of the nerine in its original locality. This talk will cover the fascinating saga from the original discovery of N. bowdenii through to its recent rediscovery in the Eastern Cape by a researcher from the University of Natal.

About the speaker:
Dr John David has recently retired as Head of Horticultural Taxonomy at RHS Garden Wisley and is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Reading, actively pursuing his research on bulbous plants. He is a member of the RHS’s Bulb Expert Group and member of the Nerine & Amaryllid Society, as well as a co-author of Plant Heritage’s ‘Growing Heritage Action Plan’ (2007). He has been researching and growing nerines for over twenty years and is the author of articles on the genus in The Garden and co-author of the RHS Grower Guide (2020) based on the RHS’s Hardy Nerine trial (2014 – 2017).