The Shaler Garden Club is once again hosting its annual plant sale from 9 a.m. to noon at Kiwanis Park on Saturday, May 3.

The plant sale has been going on since 1953, and has been a very popular fundraiser in the area since then.

"It's really our only big fundraiser," says Shelley Nilson, co-president of the club and a member since 1986. "It really goes back to the time when Shaler was an agricultural community."

The money raised goes toward clean-up projects and beautification work done at the Shaler North Hills Library. The club members helped design a better looking hillside, which was once weed-infested, Nilson says.

They also gave $1,000 last year toward groundskeeping efforts.

Besides planting flowers and bushes at the library, the club also hosts programs for children, including a bird and butterfly garden they helped create a few years ago, and a program that showed children how to properly feed local birds.

At the plant sale, residents can buy perennials, herbs, tomato plants, house plants, deer-resistant plants and water plants, among others.

The plants and flowers are all divided into categories to let people know how much sun each needs.

When the sale first started, it was held in the Mt. Royal Shopping Center. It then moved to the Intermediate School for a few years. In recent years, it's been held at Kiwanis Park, a place that the garden club helped pay for, Nilson says.

Club members used to take pre-orders for the plants, but now that many of the larger chain stores do it, they simply ask that people show up at 9 a.m. for the sale.

They keep a special community feel to the event because much of what is sold comes from the gardens of club members.

"Let's go back to our roots," Nilson says. "The original club members sold plants from their own gardens."

Club meetings are at 12:30 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of each month at the Shaler North Hills Library.

They are open to anyone interested in joining the club. The next evening meeting will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 26.