Pruning power shears, also known as hand pruners (in American English), or secateurs, are a sort of scissors to be used on plants. They are sturdy enough to prune hard branches of trees and shrubs, sometimes up to two centimetres thick. They are used in gardening, arboriculture, farming, flower arranging, power shears and nature conservation, where effective-scale habitat administration is required. Loppers are a bigger, two-handed, lengthy-handled version for branches thicker than pruning shears can lower. Cutting plants as a part of gardening dates to antiquity in both Europe and East Asian topiary, with specialised scissors used for power shears Chinese penjing and its offshoots - Japanese bonsai and Vietnamese Hòn Non Bộ - for over a thousand years. In trendy Europe, scissors solely 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. Through the late 1890s, secateurs have been sold all over Europe and the US.
Nowadays each pro- and semiprofessional gardener, vintner and fruit farmer uses secateurs. There are three different blade designs for pruning cordless power shears: anvil, bypass and parrot-beak. Anvil pruners have only one blade, which closes onto a flat floor