Designing Wild: The Art and Ecology of Mo Helmi’s Urban Landscapes

Urbanization has built towering cities, massive businesses and large hubs of community and commerce, but it also pushes wildlife out of their native areas, changing entire ecosystems. A flower poking up from the sidewalk becomes a novelty worthy of photography, a reminder of the earth beneath the asphalt.

From rooftop gardens to alleyway farms, the wilds are making their way back to the city, and there is a man who takes a unique approach to restoring the green.

Mo Helmi is a British Landscape Artist and the founder of Tricoastal Scapes, a London and Los Angeles-based design studio. He spent fifteen years in Fashion Design and Fashion Editorials in London and Milan, and transitioned to landscape art. He has eight years of experience designing private and public gardens on both sides of the Atlantic.

He uses his fashion and art background to create “immersive sensory stimulation green spaces,” ones that not only look beautiful but feel functional and impact the environment and biodiversity.

In Helmi’s eyes, rewilding is more than an ecological act; it’s a cultural design. His work treats wildness not as chaos to be controlled, but as a form of intelligence, beauty, and resilience all on its own. Through thoughtful interventions, he turns vacant urban land into mini wilds that support biodiversity and change the way people feel, move, and belong when in the space.

Redefining Rewilding

Plants and gardens were a passion and a source of inspiration for Helmi during fashion career, with natural elements making it onto his mood boards often. His personal interest in wellness, sustainability, and environmental impact carried over from his early days in fashion, including work with Condé Nast Traveller as an assistant.

When he transitioned from fashion into requalifying for Landscape Design, he noticed a gap in the industry: creating green spaces that benefit people, physically and mentally, support biodiversity and the environment, and also avoid sacrificing the beauty of the design and aesthetics. To combine all these elements would be his focus for the next eight years.

The road wasn’t easy. Many people rejected that Helmi could go from fashion to landscape design of all fields, and once he earned their respect with his skills, he then had to convince potential clients that they could have aesthetics and biodiversity.

With his commitment to blending the three elements, Helmi became successful at communicating his vision, and later took on several top projects that demonstrate how attainable his mission truly is.

From Dead Zones to Ecosystems

Helmi’s main focus as a Landscape Artist is to transform underused and overlooked spaces into vibrant ecologies that serve people, plants, and wildlife. No project demonstrates his ability more than the Soho Farmhouse Forest project. Beginning from a quick conversation that turned into a coffee discussion, this project repurposed a 2,400 square-meter former 5A side pitch, which was once a construction yard, into a dense, multi-layered native forest with a central glade for wellness.

This massive undertaking required extensive native woodland research and utilized the Japanese Miyawaki approach. Helmi and his team designed a fast-establishing ecosystem, prioritizing biodiversity, soil health, and long-term resilience, while keeping the space imbued with an intentional feeling of calm.

They planted over 3,000 plants across 42 native species, and enhanced the soil with organic biochar to improve air, water and soil quality, a decision they hoped would contribute to wider rewilding efforts across the UK.

The wellness glade is Helmi’s most meaningful piece of the project. The glade is designed for reflection, education, and community, currently hosting wellness and learning experiences that reconnect members to nature while opening conversations around rewilding urban and rural landscapes.

Quiet Impact, Lasting Change

Helmi advocates for low-ego design, preferring to build a space that feels inevitable rather than imposed. By working with that natural area rather than against it, he is able to make order out of the wild and keep intentionality present throughout the space. This touch honors the roots of wilderness, and doesn’t aim to contain, but to blossom the natural gifts of rewilding.

To achieve the fullest experience and impact, he works to make his designs long-lasting, not just picture-perfect on day one. As with the Soho Farmhouse Project, the area was designed to support native species and to build a strong foundation in soil health. The goal for Helmi is continuous improvement of the area over time, rooting his practice in stewardship, not spectacle.

A Model for Cities of the Future

Helmi’s ultimate goal is to “create omnipresent green belts that will run across cities around the world.” He will continue growing his landscape business and expanding his work in the future in order to change the mindset around beautiful green space in opposition to environmental impact, continuing to show that the two are more intertwined than people know.

He hopes for his work to become part of initial home, neighborhood, and even city garden designs, not an afterthought once construction is done. If he can “achieve changing the mindset to where people value attaining the ownership of a green space as much as they wish to attain owning a Birkin then it is a massive achievement,” then he believes himself to be successful.