When you have finished building a new building for your business, you want to make sure the area looks both professional and attractive. In order to do that, you want to make sure that you are working with the right people. In this case, that's a landscape company. They will tell you about the two categories of landscaping they can do for you. Those are hardscaping and softscaping.

Hardscaping

Hardscaping isn't something that most people are aware of, even though they see it all the time. Hardscaping is all the hard or non-organic parts of a landscape plan. Those include things like sidewalks, parking lots, lights, and other decorations. Hardscape experts may start working on the plan for your property from the very start, working with the architects and the builders so that the features you want can be worked into the design. It is easier to plan certain features, like where your parking lot or lights will go before any building happens. For example, planning where lights or water features or sprinklers will go before the building gets started will save time and energy because the subcontractors will be able to do the work while they are installing everything else. That will also mean that finished landscaping won't need to be torn up and replaced in order to do the initial installation. The hardscape expert will continue to work with the contractors as the building is being built to make sure that everything goes according to plan.

Softscaping

Softscaping is pretty much everything else you see in your landscape. There are places where the hardscaping and softscaping would intersect. For example, you may want to have large planters, which would come under hardscaping. But softscaping would involve the plants and such that would go into the planter. The softscaper will talk to you and find out what you are looking for when it comes to what kind of plantings you want to have on your property, such as what kind of grass or flowers you would like to have. Depending on the size of your project, you may have a hardscaper and a softscaper, but for a small project, you may have one person doing both.

You want your business to look good, no matter what. One way to do that is to make sure your landscaping is good. That means you need to have good hardscaping and softscaping.

For more tips and information, reach out to a local hardscape contractor.