page_title: Pruning shears
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Pruning shears / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Collection of secateurs donated by Mrs M Dewey to Breamore House, Hampshire, England, in memory of her husband Bernard. Currently housed in their countryside museum.
context_page_description: Pruning shears, also called hand pruners, 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, plant nursery works, 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.
context_section_description: 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-François Bertrand de Molleville was listed in "Bon Jardinier", as the inventor of secateurs. During the late 1890s, secateurs were sold all over Europe and the US. Today secateurs are widely used by gardeners, vintners and fruit farmers.
  The world's first anvil pruners were developed and produced in 1923 by Walther Schröder in Kiel, Germany. The pruners were given the product name "Original LÖWE" and were distributed internationally as far back as 1925. Other companies are producing anvil pruners, include Bahco, Edma, Felco, Fiskars Gardena and Wolf Garten.
  An extensive collection of historical variants of secateurs can be seen at Breamore House, Hampshire, England. They are housed in their countryside museum.
caption: Collection of secateurs at Beamore House.
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