What Are the Different Types of Landscaping?

Ask five landscapers for the types of landscaping and you'll get five lists. Most of them boil down to the same thing: there's the part of the garden that grows, the part that's built, the plan that ties them together, and the water that keeps it alive. Once you see it that way, it's much easier to say what your garden needs and to compare quotes.

What is soft landscaping?

Soft landscaping, or softscaping, is the living part of a garden: flower beds, shrubs, trees, groundcover and lawn. It's what most people picture when they think of a garden, and it's the part that changes with the seasons and needs looking after.

In practice, soft landscaping work means new beds, planting and lawn. Top Trimmers' landscaping covers new beds, planting and garden design, and we lay roll-on lawn too.

What is hard landscaping?

Hard landscaping, or hardscaping, is the non-living part: patios, paths, walls, steps, edging, gravel and decks. It gives the garden its shape and the places you walk and sit, and it's the frame the plants grow around.

Is lawn a type of landscaping?

Yes, lawn is part of soft landscaping, and in many Cape Town gardens it's the biggest single part. The grass you choose matters. Kikuyu likes full sun, is tough under heavy use and needs regular mowing, and it will creep into your beds. LM Berea copes with shade and needs less mowing and feeding.

Top Trimmers lays both as roll-on lawn. We no longer lay buffalo, and we don't lay artificial grass.

What is water-wise or indigenous landscaping?

Water-wise landscaping means choosing plants that need little extra water once they're settled. In the Western Cape, fynbos is the classic choice: most fynbos plants are hardy and water-wise once established. Proteas, leucadendrons, pincushions and restios are all fynbos.

There's a catch on this side of Cape Town. Fynbos prefers slightly acidic, sandy, well-drained soil, but along the coast north of the city much of the ground is dune sand that's still alkaline. The plants that grow wild on that sand belong to the coastal dune bush, Cape Flats Dune Strandveld: evergreen, hard-leaved and succulent shrubs, with herbs and grasses in between. Inland, the Tygerberg Hills around Durbanville are renosterveld country, which grows on richer clay soils from shale, a different soil again. So the right indigenous garden near the coast isn't the same as the right one in Durbanville.

Where does irrigation fit in?

Irrigation is the water side of landscaping, and in Cape Town it has rules. There have been no water restrictions since 1 November 2020, but the City's permanent Water By-law rules still apply: garden watering only before 9am or after 6pm, hosepipes need a trigger nozzle, automated sprinklers must be adjustable so they don't waste water, and you may not hose down paving with municipal drinking water.

Top Trimmers has an irrigation expert on hand who does all our irrigation systems, so it can go in with the planting rather than as an afterthought.

What about wind?

Wind is its own design problem here. The south-easter blows through summer, and gardens near the sea also take salt. A horticulturist who wrote a book on coastal gardening in South Africa says the best built windbreaks are see-through ones, such as a trellis, a picket fence or breeze blocks, because they break the force of the wind, while a high solid wall creates turbulence that damages plants behind it. Near the sea, a windbreak also protects the garden from salt damage.

The types of landscaping at a glance