I signed on to be part of this year’s St. Anthony Park Garden tour on Saturday, June 30, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. You can get tickets ahead of time at neighborhood businesses, or just show up Saturday at the St. Anthony Park Library in St. Paul, located at Como and Carter Avenues. Get a map to the library.

Much of my garden is self seeded, but many other plants came from the Friends School Plant Sale. Here are a few photos from this spring and early summer.

Below: Self-seeded annuals join with perennials such as Delphinium chinensis ‘Butterfly Blue’ in the south-facing, narrow, rocky area between the sidewalk and the fence. Clematis jackmanii and ‘General Sikorski’ grow on trellises behind the fence–in keeping with the clematis “heads in the sun, feet in the shade” preference. This is pretty close to the way the garden will look for the garden tour.

Below: A John Davis climbing rose grows in the front corner of the fence. It has finished its first bloom as I write this in late June, but during the garden tour you’ll see blooms of Clematis ‘Roguchi’ growing among the leaves.

Below: Earlier in spring, the garden inside the front gate showed daffodils, foamflower and spurge. The variegated leaves of Yellow Archangel ‘Herman’s Pride’ (Lamiastrum galeobdolon ‘Herman’s Pride’) are visible along the sidewalk, and still look good today. Everything else has been succeeded by taller plants, and lilies have come up throughout.

Below: These Claude Shride martagon lilies just finished blooming before the garden tour. (Lilium martagon ‘Claude Shride’ is very vigorous and I recommend it to anyone interested in lilies.) But a number of different asiatic lilies are in bloom at this point.