Andy Sell is a Senior Associate landscape architect and ecologist at Sasaki’s Boston office, where he has practiced for eight years. With a focus on design for biodiversity and ecological performance, Andy contributes to a wide range of projects—from local arboretum collections to large-scale international urban plans. His passion for restoring natural systems in urban environments is evident in projects like the ecological restoration plan for Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens, Greece, and the Arboretum San Antonio Master Plan in Texas, which he managed.
Andy is deeply invested in the connection between design and long-term environmental stewardship, advocating for strategies that link landscape architecture with maintenance and operations for lasting impact.
Before joining Sasaki, Andy worked as a park ranger at Glacier National Park in Montana and held diverse roles—from horticulture to donor development—at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture with a concentration in Conservation Ecology from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.
Outside of the office, Andy teaches and lectures on the intersection of ecology and design, enjoys gardening, and keeps up with his family’s farm outside Detroit, Michigan.
WLA | What was your path to becoming a landscape architect?
AS | My path to landscape architecture has been a circuitous one, molded by a series of life experiences that continue to inform my practice every day. Growing up on my family’s farm, I always knew I wanted a career connected to the natural world. As a kid I was fascinated by the drawings of John James Audubon, so I thought I’d become an ornithologist… that didn’t kill all their specimens. To my farmer parents’ surprise, I went to art school for scientific illustration and eventually landed in industrial design and minored in ecology.
My curiosity about the natural world guided my education. While taking wood sculpture and carpentry classes, I also enrolled in courses like woody plant taxonomy and forest ecology—I wanted to understand the materials I was working with and how their life histories shaped their physical properties.
I didn’t fully discover landscape architecture until after undergrad and a few years as a park ranger at Glacier. I began working at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, where I moved from education, restoration, curation, and donor development. I didn’t realize at the time how deeply these areas are connected to landscape architecture. While working on plans for memorial trees and benches, my director, Robert Grese, FASLA, remarked, “You’re thinking like a landscape architect.” That moment, and nearly a decade at the Gardens, made pursuing an MLA feel like a natural next step. Bob became my mentor and thesis advisor, deepening my appreciation for landscape architecture—and for the work of Jens Jensen and O.C. Simonds.
At the time, I always thought I’d stay in the public garden world, but I didn’t expect to land at Sasaki and fall in love with its collaborative culture and design ethos. I feel fortunate not just to contribute to a single garden, but to help shape public green spaces all over. Each one is an opportunity to connect people with nature in meaningful ways.
WLA | What is your approach to landscape design?
AS | Coming from both science and creative backgrounds gives me a unique lens when approaching a project. I’m instinctively drawn to understanding the details—researching the landscape’s natural systems, its human history, and the environmental context. It’s conversations with the client and community that helps me step back to absorb the broader vision and to understand the project’s opportunities and constraints. I need to be both immersed in the landscape and grounded in the people who care about it.
Inspiration often comes from unexpected places: scientific papers, conversations with researchers, or exchanges with community members. You never know where you might find a kernel of wisdom that informs a restoration strategy, a planting palette, or a low-impact material choice. A species of importance and its interactions within its habitat can help to build a design framework that benefits the entire landscape system.
Collaboration is essential to my process. I rely on diverse perspectives and expertise to shape each design. For the Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens, we worked with an ecologist and a network of local nursery growers to navigate the challenges of a limited nursery market and the desire to keep all products in Greece to avoid transportation of invasive pests and pathogens. At Arboretum San Antonio, we partnered directly with community members to co-create the site’s vision and programming. Ultimately, I believe landscape design should be rooted in research, informed by experts, and shaped by community.
WLA | What do you try to incorporate in all your designs?
AS | Across my practice, three guiding themes consistently emerge: designing for enhanced biodiversity, linking design with operations and maintenance strategies for long-term sustainability, and establishing measurable landscape performance baselines. These principles often intersect, centered around a key question: How can our designed landscapes perform better—ecologically and socially?
We’re living through a global biodiversity crisis that’s affecting not only rare species but also the everyday ones we expect to see in our backyards and parks. Like many landscape architects, I take this challenge personally. I seek opportunities for habitat provisioning, ecological complexity, and connectivity, while also identifying and avoiding potential ecological traps. At the same time, our changing climate is impacting human health, degrading our urban green spaces and threatening infrastructure. The solutions to both are linked and applicable across scales, urban and rural.
Ellinikon Park ecological restoration strategies.
At Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens, 650 acres of parkland transformed from a former airfield presented a unique opportunity to reintroduce native canopy and Maquis shrubland. Although the site has been shaped by human activity for millennia, we used nearby reference ecosystems to set goals for habitat structure and biodiversity. Our team developed associative faunal and floral webs to inform plant selection, ensuring high-impact choices for biodiversity enhancement.
Thank you to Andy Sell taking the time to provide answers to our profile questions.
Images: Courtesy of Sasaki
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