“Hopefully, these plans will be well in hand so that when I pass on the Applewood home and grounds will become a memorial museum for the public to use and enjoy and thereby foster an interest in history, preserve a gracious way of living, and perpetuate the memory of Mr. Mott.”
– RUTH RAWLINGS MOTT
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. 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.
The New Pavilion
The largest construction project at Applewood in decades kicked off in 2024. The new pavilion, outlined in the Applewood Master Plan, opened in 2025 and brings much-needed visitor amenities to the lower gardens area. The pavilion is used by visitors every day Applewood is open and includes gender neutral restrooms, a lactation/quiet room, open air shelter, a water station, accessible paths, new landscaping, and flexible learning space for programming. The pavilion is also used occasionally by community groups and nonprofit organizations for meetings and other mission-related gatherings.
Horticulture
A dedicated team of talented horticulturists helps maintain year-round the sprawling gardens and grounds at Applewood. In preparation for the 2024 season, 4,000 tulip bulbs and more than 275 flats of annuals were planted for visitors’ enjoyment. Hundreds of bushels of produce are harvested each year. The fruit tree harvest in 2023 produced the seventh largest crop since 2003, when Applewood began keeping records, with a total of 316 bushels. There were 269 bushels harvested in 2024.
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. One former participant has since been hired into a full-time landscape specialist position.
Taste of Applewood
Every visitor to Applewood receives a piece of fresh produce grown on site or a taste made with Applewood-grown ingredients as part of the Taste of Applewood program. Each type of produce is accompanied by a brief bit of history about the item, the harvest location, and its connection to the Motts’ legacy of civic participation. In 2024, we served a variety of fresh produce, including vibrant spring greens like Swiss chard and garlic chives, as well as crabapples and other fruit. For Mother’s Day, guests enjoyed a special apple crumble, and as always, we shared many apples with visitors and community members.
Community Events
Applewood’s largest annual event, 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. In a nod to Applewood’s harvest history, the Taste of Applewood offerings included the traditional cider and apple doughnuts and heritage apples and chive dip made with herbs from the Demonstration Garden. The event also hosts a variety of community partner activities tied to civic participation.
In 2023, Applewood also hosted the 20th anniversary celebration of the Michigan Governor’s Office of Foundation Liaison, including a variety of Applewood activities and virtual remarks from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Field Trips
More than 1,400 students and chaperones from schools, summer programs, and day care centers participated in Applewood field trips in the 2024 season alone. The field trips give participants an opportunity to explore how they can make an impact on their community.
Bring Your Lunch and Learn
The Bring Your Lunch and Learn monthly series featured a panel of experts and/or community members with lived experience. As a presidential election year, the 2024 focus on civic participation provided a great opportunity to hear from a variety of grant and community partners with clear calls to action for the participants. The program encouraged conversations from multiple viewpoints to help create dialogue around the process of making decisions that impact a community.
Civic Matters
This program 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 Integrated Pest Management, environmental activism, identifying historic structures, photo preservation, and urban forestry.
What’s in Bloom Garden Tour
The What’s In Bloom Tour offers a guided walk of the grounds and gardens, co-facilitated by members of the horticulture and education teams, and highlights changing areas of interest throughout the grounds. Participants often used the tours to ask questions about the plants they grew, and to get advice on caring for everything from turf to perennials to fruit trees. In 2024, we paired the tours with In the Gardens, an informal drop-in program in which visitors were given the opportunity to try new gardening techniques and skills that can be taken back to their own homes and communities.
Storytime at Applewood
The weekly Storytime program, which encourages parent-and-child together time, explored topics ranging from food and health and giving back to the community to the traditional opening and closing of a farm themes. Attendees engaged in hands-on activities like creating miniature greenhouses, making a community soup to share, and exploring creative arts through poetry and keepsake projects. Several sessions included a hat and glove drive to benefit the Boys & Girls Club to support the theme of giving back to the community. We partnered with Comma Bookstore, Flint’s only Black-owned bookstore, to acquire a selection of books.
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.
