Santa Barbara Cactus & Succulent Society

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Santa Barbara Cactus & Succulent Society

Learning to understand and care for succulent plants at home and in the wild through education, conservation, and research. Our meetings are open to the public.

SBCSS meets on the 3rd Wednesday of every month at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church located at 909 N La Cumbre Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93110. Doors open at 7 and the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. Each month we host a featured speaker, raffle a wide variety of plants and members often share free cuttings of interesting cultivars from their own gardens.

08/17/2026

Our speaker for the August 19th meeting will be Tom Cole on Aloe Journeys Across Kenya: Examining What’s Along Some of the Roads Less Travelled

📍The meeting will be held at the Fellowship Hall at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (909 N La Cumbre Rd). Set up at 6:45, doors open at 7pm, program begins at 7:30pm.

Tom will provide a pictorial scrapbook of travels across remote areas of Kenya documenting that country’s extensive aloe taxa. Many of the images and stories he will share are a precursor to a larger body of work that he is presently undertaking with two of Kenya’s top botanists, Prof. Emily Wabuyele and Anne Powys. Building of the success of his Field Guide to the Aloes of Uganda, the present collaboration is the first field guide dedicated to the 70+ aloes species found across the vast expanses of Kenya. Given the remote and inhospitable nature of many of these habitats, this is the first time that images of many of these species have been shared with larger audiences outside of Kenya.

👏 Tom will have a limited number of East African aloe species available for purchase at the talk- rarely offered species from Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Read more in our club newsletter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pZKu9suuI6euAWydy4xeYXVpidaAwmN7/view

06/15/2026

Our speaker for the June 17th meeting will be Peter Walkowiak on the topic of “Soils and Fertilizing for Succulents.”

📍The meeting will be held at the Fellowship Hall at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (909 N La Cumbre Rd). Set up at 6:45pm, doors open at 7pm, program begins at 7:30pm.

Read our full June newsletter here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v_Ms9svzaIpBs4SlksQTMRdo_fDWj2je/view

A good soil mix is the foundation of success in growing succulents well. Peter will talk about the many do’s and dont’s when growing your succulents. This will be a hands-on, Q&A demonstration starting with soil mix, transplanting, and care of your succulent plants. Bring all your questions you have about growing your succulents! Peter’s personal collection numbers well over two thousand plants. About half are cacti with the remaining consisting of Euphorbia and caudiciforms. Some of the plants he has owned for over 40 years.

05/19/2026

Join us on Wednesday, May 20th for a talk with Satie Airamé for her presentation: At Play in the Wildflower Fields of Southern Africa

The meeting will be held at the Fellowship Hall at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (909 N. La Cumbre Rd.). Set up at 6:45pm, doors open at 7pm, program begins at 7:30pm.

This month marks our club’s 50th anniversary with the first meeting taking place on May 7th, 1976. Please join us for a celebratory cupcake at the meeting and peruse the archival scrapbooks!

Satie Airamé is an explorer, naturalist, and photographer with boundless enthusiasm for biodiversity. She has traveled to 36 countries to study and photograph plants and animals in nature. Satie served as Assistant Dean for the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UCSB from 2011 to 2025 and was part of the planning team for California's network of marine protected areas from 1999 to 2011. She studied ecology at the University of Chicago and CalPoly Humboldt, grew up on a ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Mariposa near Yosemite National Park, and has lived in Santa Barbara for 26 years with her spouse Jeff Chemnick, proprietor of Aloes in Wonderland.

Her presentation is a photographic journey through one of the world's most magnificent wildflower displays, featuring succulents in bloom from Namaqualand, bulbs of Nieuwoudtville, succulents of the Richtersveld, and dune specialties from Namibia's Sperrgebiet.

For more information, check out our May newsletter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yc9qSx2JvAzUh2QOE6qzudj0I52WnN8X/view

04/14/2026

Join us on April 15th for a talk with Tom McCoy who will present on Saudi Arabian Aloes!

📍The meeting will be held at the Fellowship Hall at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (909 N. La Cumbre Rd.). Set up at 6:45pm, doors open at 7pm, program begins at 7:30pm.

Born in Long Beach, California, Tom McCoy developed a passion for natural history at a young age, collecting fossils, seashells, reptiles, birds, and plants. His interest in botany eventually led him to travel widely across Asia, Africa, the Americas, Arabia, and Madagascar.

For more than 30 years, Tom has lived in Saudi Arabia while building an extraordinary body of work focused on the genus Aloe. He has published extensively, named more than 50 species, and maintains one of the world’s largest documented live collections of aloes. He is also a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a member of several major scientific organizations.

This promises to be a fascinating presentation for anyone interested in aloes, field botany, plant exploration, and the remarkable diversity of succulents from Arabia.

For more information check out our April newsletter:
https://drive.google.com/file/u/1/d/1E8a5lxs56dFuzighewAhZoToHBFj-prp/view?usp=sharing

Address

Santa Barbara, CA

Website

http://www.sbcactus.org/

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