Secateur

Pruning shears, also called hand pruners (in American English), or secateurs, are a type of scissors for use on plants. They are strong enough to prune hard branches of trees and shrubs, sometimes up to two centimetres thick. They are used in gardening, arboriculture, farming, flower arranging, and nature conservation, where fine-scale habitat management is required.

Loppers are a larger, two-handed, long-handled version for branches thicker than pruning shears can cut.

Cutting plants as part of gardening dates to antiquity in both Europe and East Asian topiary, with specialized scissors used for Chinese penjing and its offshoots – Japanese bonsai and Vietnamese Hòn Non Bộ – for over a thousand years.

In modern Europe, scissors only used for gardening work have existed since 1819, when the French aristocrat Antoine Francois Bertrand de Molleville was listed in "Bon Jardinier", as the first inventor of secateurs. During the late 1890s, secateurs were sold all over Europe and the US. Nowadays every pro- and semiprofessional gardener, vintner and fruit farmer uses secateurs.

There are three different blade designs for pruning shears: anvil, bypass and parrot-beak.

Anvil pruners have only one blade, which closes onto a flat surface; unlike bypass blades it can be sharpened from both sides and remains reliable when slightly blunt. Anvil pruners are useful for cutting thick branches; one can bite into the stem from one direction, swing the handle around and bite further through narrowed wood from another direction. The anvil is made of a material softer than the blade, so that the blade is not damaged when it meets the anvil. Suitable materials for the anvil are plastic, aluminum, zinc, brass, or bronze alloys. The blades are made from hardened carbon or chromium steels. The hardness of the blades is generally between 54 and 58 HRC. On an anvil pruner, proper cutting is assured even if the blade swerves slightly to the left or right during cutting. As long as the blade meets the anvil at the end of the cut and fits tightly against it, the material is separated. For this reason, the blades of anvil pruners can be ground thinner than those on bypass pruners. The LÖWE principle – a drawing cut made against a fixed support – combines a drawing cut with a pushing cut. This is possible because the blade lever and base lever are connected by an eccentric bearing. When the pruners are open, the blade is longer than the anvil thanks to the eccentric bearing. When the pruners close, the blade draws back slightly while it pushes through the material. This reduces the cutting force needed to make a cut still further.

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Wikipedia