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Return to the Land: the Woodland Gardens of Manitoga
 Wright has said that, "I am more interested in nature than any other subject,"[49] which is borne out by the 80 acres at Manitoga. This "Place of the Great Spirit" was an overgrown abandoned industrial site when Mary and Russel first purchased it in 1941: a collection of granite quarries strewn with rocks, metal and weeds among untamed hemlocks and birches. Over the years, Wright studied the land, developed pathways that lead from one forest room or open vista to another, cut away underbrush and encouraged indigenous plants and mosses to flourish. He diverted a stream to create a seasonal waterfall that transformed one of the larger quarry pits into a swimming pond and visual focus for the house. Manitoga is perhaps America's most important woodland garden and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Inspired both by Wright's childhood in the woods surrounding the farmlands of Southwestern Ohio and by his exposure to the stroll gardens of Kyoto, Manitoga is considered by Wright scholars to be his most important creative contribution.[50] Ian McHarg (1921-2001), Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania declared,
If it had been built in Japan, Manitoga would be a national monument, visited by processions of pilgrims. Japan has many such sites-Ryoanji, Saihoji, Katsura, and more-but the United States has only Manitoga, the temple to managed succession, inspired ecological design.[51]
Historian and curator Robert Schonfeld adds in his essay here that,
Wright's decision to spend more time at Manitoga proved to be the most important of the designer's career…. Over the course of the rest of his life, he would create not only his personal masterpiece, but one of the most ambitious and important works of American domestic landscape design of the 20th century. In doing this, Wright would also dramatically widen his view of contemporary domestic life to include not just the home, but nature itself…. It is a masterpiece of American design, brought into being out of the deep feeling that the family, the home and the native landscape lie at the core of the American Experience.[52]
 At frequent times during his career, Wright expressed frustration and disappointment with his work. Self-critical perhaps to a fault, his spoken and written words often carried a bitter undertone. By the mid 1960s, public taste had changed, and Wright felt out of step with evolving tastes. But what he stood for, and what he actually accomplished during his lifetime have proven more durable than his unbreakable Melmac© dinnerware. He focused attention on the value of histories and traditions, the integrity of indigenous materials, and the ethics of affordable design. The reawakening of interest in mid-20th- century modern design in the first decade of the 21st is partly predictable nostalgia. But more than that, we have also come to recognize the underlying values that informed that movement, perhaps even better than when it was new. "Good design for everyone" is no longer
the philosophy of a single person. It is the foundation of some of the most successful merchandizing companies in the world. People want to live with good design. Japan's economy has waned since the 1990s, but its designers and industries still produce some of the world's most useful products, due in part to Wright's insights. Through the lessons of Manitoga, a generation of landscape architects has learned the values of low-impact land reclamation.
Putting his own career in perspective, Russel commented, "I left the theater because it was so ephemeral. The product there may only live a few days after months of work. So I was exhilarated to design products that lasted longer…. Yet, basically they, too, are ephemeral. But not nature. With careful planning and design, that will last forever." [53]
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