The term soft landscape is used by practitioners of landscape design, landscape architecture, and garden design; and gardeners to describe the vegetative materials which are used to improve a landscape by design. The corresponding term hard landscape is used to describe construction materials. 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.
References
Soft landscape materials Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA