Scully, a 2-year-old Weimaraner, visits the Sportsman Lake Wildflower Garden on March 25.

Volunteers who’ve helped rejuvenate the park-within-a-park wildflower garden at Sportsman Lake are inviting the public to come to the lake this Saturday for a free art show and firsthand look at the garden’s new and upcoming features.

The Arts in the Garden show will be held Saturday, May 13 at the Woodlands & Wildflower Garden at Sportsman Lake, running from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. There’s no cost to enter the park or attend the event, which will feature exhibits from local artists who’ll also be working on-site throughout the day on garden-themed projects.

Unlike a lot of seasonal art outings, the art at the park will simply be on display rather than on sale, explains Ben Johnson, a member of the Cullman Master Gardeners group that has worked to reclaim the garden, in recent months, from nature’s encroachment.

With pathways cleared, plants at the park labeled, and pedestrian bridges installed through the efforts of students at the Cullman Area Technology Academy (CATA), it’s a chance to put the garden on visitors’ radar, while sharing a vision of how it can grow as an educational and enjoyable community asset.

“It’s really a way to give people another reason to come and enjoy some art, to see the revitalization of the park, and to encourage them to come back and keep using it,” said Johnson.

In addition to the beauty of the garden itself — a shady, florally curated section of Sportsman Lake Park that Johnson says should offer a nice respite as summer heats up — a half dozen local artists will be scattered throughout the garden to showcase their work across a range of media including sculpture, painting, and photography.

A children’s book walk will take kids on a moving tour of the garden, with the story unfolding at stops along the way, and CATA students will be on hand to help install a new wooden relief sculpture that “welcomes” guests to the garden with signage in 30 languages.

Owned and operated by Cullman County as part of the county’s wider parks system, the Woodlands & Wildflower Garden lies near the first bend in the paved road that leads into the lake’s picnic pavilion area, marked on the roadside by a red Torii gate that greets pedestrians at its entrance. Local Master Gardeners have rehabilitated the garden at no cost to the county, and Johnson says the group has bigger plans to continue its evolution in similarly volunteer-driven ways.

“We are working toward making the garden into an arboretum — a tree museum that will add the educational component of sharing the park’s tree features with the public,” he said. “We’d like to invite people to come and see that vision on Saturday as well, and kind of be there with us from the beginning in that process.”