If you’ll be driving along the coast in Northern California mid-month, consider a stop along the Quarryhill Botanical Garden, 12841 Sonoma Highway, Glen Ellen, California (map) for an insider’s tour.

Set for 11:30 a.m. June 12, 2013, the tour (sponsored by the Santa Rosa Symphony League) offers the rare opportunity to tour the garden’s greenhouse (which is not usually open to the public). Tickets are $35.

Corey Barnes, the education coordinator and nursery manager, will tell you what he’s working on in the greenhouse and show how he propagates plants — followed by lunch.

Then, you can visit the 25 acres of wild-collected plant species on your own. Of special interest is the newly dedicated Jiang Entian Heritage Rose Garden, tracing the lineage of garden roses back to their Chinese ancestry.

Founded in 1987, Quarryhill is one of the pre-eminent Asian botanical gardens globally, featuring one of the largest collections of documented, wild-collected Asian plants in the world.

(Photo of Rosa setipoda courtesy of Quarryhill Botanical Garden)