As a gardener architect, I have lived and designed with many soils over my career, some are in the ground, others are on buildings. Ecosystems have been engaged with as co-creative beings and through this dialogue between human and other-than-human actants, an architectural animism has grown.In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, the-secular-modern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of places-ecosystems-as beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world.In order to convey and reflect on this modern animism, as well as the method used, I have written to the soils to begin an animistic correspondence. 1 The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in-between the multiple voices of various "actants." The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of OUR earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awarenessempathy and care-toward these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship.These earthly beings have written back to me. ♦ Dear Eric, Thank you for your recent letter. We have been touched by your message, and the way you have-physically-touched us over the years.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London has been celebrated as an exemplar of sustainable landscape architecture and regeneration. Yet tracing the new materialist histories of its enmeshed soils reveals how complex sustainable landscape architecture is. On the one hand, the park has expertly recycled and locally sourced its materials. On the other, the socioecosystems of its soil assemblages have been pulverized, treated and mixed to create a new profile of synthetic geological strata. Their history and life have been erased. The subterranean sections through this park are caricatures of a 'sustainable Anthropocene'. Here, the anthropogenic geology supporting the vision of idealized future ecosystems is used for the global marketing of a nation and property developments. This project indicates a destructive systemic blindness in sustainable approaches and the need for truly regenerative design processes, based on working with a place, including the various (other-than) human inhabitants, instead of solely mining its materials to create a perfect vision anew.