Soft Landscaping

Soft landscaping refers to the living part of your garden. The hedges, planting, lawns, ponds, wildflowers and their supporting systems.

At Holland Landscapes we use soft landscaping to style and “dress” your garden in the same way that an interior designer uses soft furnishings to define the character or your home.

It doesn’t matter whether your garden is large, small, urban or rural, sloping or level. With careful planting design we can transform a lifeless garden into an urban oasis; a purely functional front garden into a warm welcome; an uninspiring pond into a water garden.

Hard landscaping (the patio, paths, decking, and structures in a garden) is fixed. Planting can adapt and grow with you and your family. You can play with plant combinations, change the shape of the lawn – even change the whole character of the garden.

If you are happy with the structure of your garden but want to change the style. Talk to Holland Landscapes and find out how soft landscaping can help you achieve your dreams.

Low Maintenance Gardens

Low maintenance doesn’t necessarily mean sterile. By choosing the right plants for the conditions in your garden, you can still have lots of living colour without needing to spend a lot of time gardening.

Tricks such as using gravel instead of grass or installing an automated irrigation system ensure that your garden stays beautiful and manageable for a very long time.

gravel driveway after planting refresh to create an interesting low maintenance border

Front Gardens

Many of our customers choose to use their front garden for car parking. However, that doesn’t mean that soft landscaping has no place. A hedge forms can act as a great privacy screen and noise barrier. It also provides shelter (and sometimes food) for a wide variety of wildlife.

Low maintenance plants look fantastic with low level lighting and “soften” a property, increasing the kerb appeal and potentially adding to the value of the house.

Back Gardens

Make your back garden into a truly useful and inviting outdoor space with soft landscaping. If your garden is overlooked, carefully chosen trees and shrubs can improve privacy. Got some great views? Enhance them with clever planting.

Consider some scented plants to add another sensory dimension. A back garden is also great place to grow a few culinary herbs or veggies. Think too about how your lawn doubles as a leisure space and a way of creating a lush, green, private oasis.

Water gardens

A carefully landscaped pond can be a true asset to a garden. The wildlife value is immense but so is the capacity for these soft landscaping features to change the mood of a garden. This pond is a contemporary design and houses the owner’s fish collection. However, a pond, or indeed a stream or a rain garden can suit any style of garden and serve many functions.

Read our case study showing how soft landscaping transformed a tired and outdated water feature into a wonderful wildlife pond. Click here to read the article

Country Gardens

Soft landscaping is an integral part of a country garden – even a low maintenance one. Any garden should blend in with the character of its surroundings. And when you are surrounded by trees, farmland and country cottages it seems a little disloyal to have a plant-free garden.

A country garden needn’t be high maintenance. Working with a garden designer and/or a professional landscaper will allow you to find that perfect balance between soft landscaping and manageability.

Urban Gardens

A small town garden may not lend itself to natural lawns and wildflower meadows. However clever soft landscaping can impress your visitors and help you to unwind at the end of a long day.

Soft landscaping adapts itself to the size, style and aspect of a property. You may want some interesting planting to help the front of your house reflect your character. Perhaps you’d like to screen the view of neighbouring properties?

For a closer look at how soft landscaping has helped real gardens, visit our portfolio of work.