Ruth Rawlings Mott was a woman of vision. It was Ruth Mott who was inspired to restore Applewood as a place of beauty in Flint and who was responsible for Applewood’s rebirth as a community space and lasting tribute to Charles Stewart Mott’s wide-reaching legacy.

Today, the Ruth Mott Foundation preserves and maintains the historic Applewood Estate, where it designs, delivers, and supports community programs to encourage community vitality. Through its programming at Applewood, the Ruth Mott Foundation is committed to sharing the enduring legacy of C.S. and Ruth Mott: their extraordinary commitment to civic participation.

With that overarching big idea in mind, all programs at Applewood in 2021-22 were reoriented to focus on the Motts’ legacy of civic engagement and providing visitors with ideas or inspiration to participate in their own communities.

While Applewood was open on a limited basis in 2021 due to the pandemic, 2022 saw Applewood open for a full season, May through October. Guests enjoyed a robust set of offerings, including Storytime at Applewood, Bring Your Lunch and Learn, Taste of Applewood, In the Gardens, Civic Saturdays, October at Applewood, Fall Harvest Festival, Holiday Walk, field trips, and house tours.

Horticulture

A dedicated team of talented horticulturists helps maintain year-round the sprawling gardens and grounds at Applewood. In preparation for the 2022 season, 15,000 annuals were germinated and transplanted in the greenhouse. In addition to the formal gardens — rose garden, perennial garden, cut garden, and demonstration garden — other horticultural features include a bowling green, pollinator garden, butterfly garden, historical exhibition greenhouse, acres of lawns, discovery trail, and the heritage apple orchard for which the estate was named. Hundreds of bushels of produce are harvested each year. The fruit tree harvest in 2022 produced the sixth largest crop since 2003, when Applewood began keeping records, with a total of 336 bushels.

The horticulture team for several years now has worked with a local workforce development program, St. Luke N.E.W. Life Center. The recruits help maintain Applewood and gain soft skills and work experience that will be beneficial for future jobs. Staff work alongside the participants to support them and overcome challenges, including access to transportation, work attire, and housing.

Community Events

For the first time since the pandemic, two of Applewood’s large events, Fall Harvest Festival and Holiday Walk, were brought back in 2022. Grantee partners and other community organizations were highlighted throughout. Fall Harvest Festival celebrates everything that makes Applewood special: A place where family and friends can enjoy nature’s beauty, learn, eat locally grown food, acquire a new skill, and experience the enduring legacy of C.S. and Ruth Mott. At Holiday Walk, visitors could contribute to a coat, hat, and mitten drive for a north Flint mission.

Field Trips

More than 900 students and chaperones from schools, summer programs, and day care centers participated in Applewood field trips in the 2022 season alone. The field trips give participants an opportunity to explore how they can make an impact on their community. In one example, a group of Kindergarten students expressed a desire to grow and share food with neighbors after completing their field trip. In another, Flint youth on the Civics and History field trip identified combatting racism and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement as ways they lived up to their own ideals.

Bring Your Lunch and Learn

The Bring Your Lunch and Learn monthly series explored a range of topics from urban chickens to native plants vs. non-native plants and preserving historic structures to apple production. Each month featured a panel of experts, including community members with lived experience in the topic areas. The program encourages conversations from multiple viewpoints to help create dialogue around the process of making decisions that impact a community.

Civic Saturdays

Civic Saturdays offers visitors an opportunity to learn new skills related to historic preservation and civic engagement. The historic preservation track showcased how preserving history is a form of civic participation. Topics included moisture monitoring, preserving photos and documents, and brick and mortar upkeep. Participants in the civic participation track could create and implement a community engagement plan of their own design. One family wished to implement a new community program and worked with staff to create a logic model and learn about grant funding opportunities.

In the Gardens

This informal weekly drop-in program showcases the skills of our horticulture team. Visitors are given the opportunity to try new gardening techniques and skills that can be taken back to their own homes and communities. Some of the activities included fruit tree pruning, rose care, hedging, vegetable maintenance and harvesting, and mulching a landscape.

Storytime at Applewood

The weekly Storytime program, which encourages parent-and-child together time, explored topics ranging from recycling to diversity and inclusion to community superheroes and the environment. The stories are always followed by a related activity. In one example, children used recycled flower catalogues to create thank you cards for people they appreciate. After a book that celebrated community superheroes, participants helped gather and pack donated supplies for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Flint’s north Flint location.

Taste of Applewood

In this program, every visitor to Applewood receives a piece of fresh produce grown on site or a taste made with ingredients grown on site. Each type of produce is accompanied by a brief bit of history about the item, the harvest location, and a tie-in to the Motts’ legacy of civic participation. For example, using pickled apples to demonstrate how preserving produce in the fall can provide nutritious food options when there is limited access to fresh foods in the winter months. In 2022 we began encouraging visitors to harvest fresh produce themselves in the demonstration garden. In addition to visitors, we shared a Taste of Applewood (both fresh produce and processed items) with many local organizations.

October at Applewood

Visitors are invited to learn about what it takes to care for the grounds, house, and collections at Applewood through this hands-on program that takes place at the end of the season. The range of topics included lawn care, house pests, gutters, and food preservation. Caring for yards and gardens as well as preserving your home and history were highlighted as important forms of civic participation.

Volunteers

During the open season, the work at Applewood would not be possible without the Ruth Mott Foundation’s dedicated volunteers who collectively provide thousands of volunteer hours. Their commitment to assisting with horticulture, collections, learning, visitor experience, and events is remarkable and we are grateful they chose Applewood.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all who have contributed to this remarkable journey, including our staff, partners, volunteers, and visitors. With enthusiasm and anticipation, we look ahead to another year of working with community as we continue to share the Mott family legacy.

“Loved the vegetable & herb gardens and all the education.”

— Visitor Experience Survey Respondent, August 2022

“Lovely, lovely, lovely!!! Thanks for preserving this wonderful place.”

— Visitor Experience Survey Respondent, September 2022

“The grounds were absolutely beautiful and it was awesome to know the history of the Motts!”

— Visitor Experience Survey Respondent, September 2022

“Thank you for being here. I have wonderful memories and am glad to visit again.”

— Visitor Experience Survey Respondent, October 2022

“Always inspired every time I visit!”

— Visitor Experience Survey Respondent, July 2022