A must have for the gardener who already has an established garden and has moved on to the maintenance stage, the pruning shears are an extremely useful tool for anyone looking to perform precision maintenance on either large bushes or smaller trees. Sometimes called secateurs in English, pruning shears are a style of scissors specifically for use on plants. Typically they are strong enough to cut through hard branches on trees up to two centimeters thick depending on the quality of the shears and the hand strength of the user. Their main use is in smaller gardens where greater emphasis is placed on aesthetics of every plant rather than in larger gardens where this would require too much time to manage.

The cutting of plants as part of maintaining a garden dates back to both ancient Europe and East Asia and it’s not currently clear exactly when the practice began. The common pruning shears that you can find in any gardening shop today will typically only have one blade which closes on to a flat surface. This has the advantage that the tool is still viable and extremely useful even when slightly blunted.