It's July and that means it's the time of year for the Behind Adobe Walls home and garden tours offered by the Santa Fe Garden Club. The tours take place on two consecutive Tuesdays,
July 19 and July 26, from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Each day, participants travel on a bus accompanied by Santa Fe Garden Club hostesses to visit and tour four private homes and their owners' standout gardens.

Tour tickets are $75 each day. The buses depart Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta, at 12:30 p.m. Participants who would like to share an optional pre-tour lunch ($20) at the hotel should be there at 11:15.

The garden club also has an ongoing series of Pequeño Tours. Visit some of Santa Fe's finest homes and gardens on private tours offered mid-April to mid-October. Each participant pays $45. The tours feature up to three residences on a Santa Fe Garden Club-hosted tour of three or four hours.

Proceeds from these tours benefit many Santa Fe and New Mexico projects in conservation and horticulture. The Santa Fe Garden Club's primary community-garden project is the New Mexico Museum of Art courtyard garden. Each Monday during the growing season, before the museum opens, "green apron-clad club members can be found planting, weeding, watering and the ubiquitous garden activity: removing spent blossoms and dead leaves to maintain the beauty of the courtyard," according to Janet Zlatoff-Mirsky, the club's publicist.

Another project is the ethnobotanical garden, planted by the Santa Fe Garden Club in the summer of 2003, at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. The club maintains a stretch of the Santa Fe River under the auspices of the Santa Fe Watershed Association. And the garden club gives an annual endowed memorial scholarship for environmental design to a deserving Santa Fe Community College student.

The Behind Adobe Walls tours often sell out, so reservations are necessary. For more information, visit www.thesantafegardenclub.org, or for information and reservations contact Terry at Westwind Travel,
984-0022 or terry@westwindtravel.net.