I am playing with a c18 Colonial-style farm scene- Blue Ridge mountains,log cabins, Davy Crockett hats (how sad am I?), shooting squirrels and fishing in the creek. 

I am enjoying myself  and can get some quite pleasing results, but everything renders too neat and tidy, especially the ground. I can stop the green billiard table effect by using a grass texture, but it still looks an obvious plane surface. 
I cannot get the morph tool or magnets to work on it, I presume it is a square plane with no geometry apart from the corner points.

Is there a ground prop that can be morphed into slight irregularities?
Can it be done by bump maps?

I would love to know how other people work on this (using P7, though I have got Bryce 5 waiting to be installed)

The ground is, indeed, a flat plane.  If I need a morphable ground in Poser I use either the Mil Environment, the DAZ environment or the IC 3.1 from RDNA.

there is a microcosm plane included with poser 6 and 7 i beleive that can be morphed.

goto

Figures - CP partners/RuntimeDNA/Microcosm/

pick one (macro is a large plane, micro is small)

then go to 

Poses - CP partners/RuntimeDNA/Microcosm/

and inject the morphs.

you get about 10 morphs to play with.

the full set from runtimeDNA is much more versiatle and there are many add on sets (free and for sale).

With landscaping in general (atistic, or 3D) ground plane, however flat, IRL is usuallty broken up by vegetation and rolling hills, rock etc, or in streetscapes by various street furniture, poles, benches, curbs, trashcans, card, buildings etc etc.
 With water, there's usually a bit of haze or reduced visibility limiting this effect.

Also, when we are looking at our surroundings, our eye is sort of trained not to notice the flatness, and it only becomes more obvious when looking at a static imahe (photo or rendering).
This is just why many landscape artists thend to avoid long distant vanishing planes, and try to obscure them with props.

In 3D you can minimize this effect in several ways:

One of the more basic and less time and system resource taxing ways is to use more elaborate textures with some iregular bump, or even few rolling hills in it,  and atmospheric effects where distant planes vanish and melt into the horizon color (haze and fog).

Another way is to add more props like grass, bushes, trees, whatever is an appropriate add-on that will block good portion of the flatness, and not detract from the scene too much. (that's where finer points of knowing how to make a composition come into play). This can also be more taxing on your time and computer resources.

Also, there's postwork, where some of the effects I described above can be achieved in postwork.

Hope that helps a little :)

You could try applying a bump and Displace map to the ground plane. The problem there is that you can't see the effect of the Displace map until the picture renders, so some of your details might unde up UNDER the swollen displaced ground plane.

Or you could use the Cloth Square, which is a fine-grained flat plane.
It takes magnets and waves nicely.  With two or three such squares,
you could make enough ridges and hollers to block the horizon.

ockham beat me to the answer. LOL I export terrains from other apps too. Shade, carrara, Vue. I think you can do the same with Bryce, not sure as I have not bothered to install Bryce6.1 on my computer.

I like this product from Andi 3D - The Land - & it isn't that expensive, but very versatile.

You could also use Terragen to create a landscape. It now has an option to export the landscape as an .obj which you could import and texture as normal

The cloth plane is easier to morph, yes - it has more vertices, but the ground plane itself has enough to make a fair approximation of an uneven ground. That, and the fact that it's already there, in the scene makes it my first choice when I want to do something "quick and dirty" (the above picture took about 10 minutes from start to Render)

Thank you everyone. 
I will remember the cloth square tip, but I've got the ground plane to morph.

I cannot get the morph dots to appear, but TrekkieGrrrl says it will morph: TG's big toe knows more about this than I do, so......what am I doing wrong??......

.......previously I had the morph tool radius set to work on a couple of points at a time on Don's ear, trying this on the ground, like digging a hole with a cotton bud. 

When I raised the radius to 0.5 and the magnitude to 2.0, the dots appeared and the grid showed the slight pushed and pulled deformation I wanted. 

So easy really : if I used my brain to think with, I'd probably be dangerous.

wriggles big toe @ you

Glad you got it to work :o))

I use Andi3D's The Land and apply any free texture photo from freestuff. Morphs and works great. There are also some free morphing terrains in freestuff. Just change the texture using some free grass or rock textures in the materials room. Works great.