Hard landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysical defined landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies.

The term soft landscape is used by gardeners and practitioners of landscape design, landscape architecture, materials which are used to improve a landscape by design. the range of soft landscape materials includes each layer of the ecological sequence: aquatic plants, semi-aquatic plants, field layer plants (including grasses and herbaceous plants) shrubs and trees.