Rowena Bell decided in the last week of March 2026 to carry three pairs of bypass secateurs through the working season in her Devon garden, alternating them by week and writing a short note on each at the end of the day. She made the decision out of mild irritation rather than rigour. A reader had asked, in a letter posted from Stroud the previous October, whether the Felco No. 2 was still worth its price. Bell did not know, and discovered that she resented not knowing.
She chose the Felco No. 2, the Niwaki GR Pro, and the ARS VS-8Z. Each had been on the market for at least five years; each was widely available; each fell, broadly, in the bracket of forty to seventy pounds. She bought one of each new from independent suppliers in March, refusing the offer of review samples that one importer made when he heard what she was doing.
The Felco No. 2 is the canonical Swiss bypass pruner, designed in 1948 by Felix Flisch and unchanged in essential form for nearly eighty years. The handle is aluminium, painted red, with a black rubber buffer between them. The blade is high-carbon steel, hardened to about 57 HRC. Every part can be replaced individually. The weight in the hand is 240 grams.
The Niwaki GR Pro is a Japanese forged pruner with a slimmer profile and a lighter swing, 195 grams in the small size Bell carried. The blade is Yasuki Hagane white-paper steel, laminated to a softer body for shock absorption. The handles are powder-coated steel. There is a small return spring under the joint and a sliding catch on the side.
The ARS VS-8Z is the heaviest of the three at 268 grams. The blade is high-carbon chrome-plated steel, the handles ergonomically curved with a rolling lower grip designed to reduce wrist fatigue on long sessions. ARS, founded in 1876 in Sakai, has been making professional secateurs since the 1950s. Bell had used them in the past and remembered the feel of them in her hand the way one remembers a hammer.
Her test was not laboratory. She is a gardener, not an engineer. Each pair was carried for a week at a time, in rotation from the first week of April through the last week of October, with a brief overlap in late May when a hedge of Lonicera nitida required all three on the same afternoon. She kept a small notebook in the breast pocket of her gardening shirt and wrote in it after lunch and again before she came in for tea.
The first week was wet. Bell pruned roses on the west wall, took out the old growth on a stand of red-twig dogwood, and reduced a young apple of the variety Ashmead's Kernel by about thirty percent of its previous winter's growth. The Felco was first up. It made the cuts she expected, with the small definite click of a blade closing against an anvil bevel.
What she noticed, on day three with the Felco, was the position of her thumb. The handle geometry of the No. 2 places the thumb slightly behind the line of the blade, which means that on cuts above shoulder height the wrist rotates outward to keep the cut clean. After two hours pruning roses she felt the rotation in the base of her thumb.
The second week she switched to the Niwaki. The first cut, on a long whippy stem of buddleia she had left for the bees, went through so cleanly that she stopped and looked at the cut face. It was glassy. There was no compression bruise, no whitened fibre at the edge. She made another cut on a thicker stem and felt almost nothing in the wrist.
She also, in the second week, dropped the Niwaki onto a flagstone twice and once into a clump of lady's mantle, where she did not find it for three hours. The Niwaki's blade is the most delicate of the three. The white-paper steel takes the keenest edge she has ever used in a pruner, but it will chip if dropped onto rock or used carelessly on a buried wire.
The third week, the ARS. The handle Bell had remembered from years before was even better than she remembered. The rolling grip on the lower handle reduces the diameter of the closure stroke just enough that her hand, which is small, can close on a stem the thickness of her thumb without straining. The cuts were clean, perhaps a hair behind the Niwaki for polish but well ahead of the Felco for ease.
By the end of May, with each pair carried through about thirty hours of cutting, a pattern had begun to emerge that Bell found honest but uncomfortable. The Felco was the most reliable, the most repairable, the most forgiving of being left out in the rain on top of the cold frame. The Niwaki was the most pleasant to use on any cut under fifteen millimetres. The ARS was the best general-purpose tool for an average day in a mixed garden.
None of these statements is news. They are the kind of statements that the catalogues themselves have been making for years. What Bell had to confirm for herself was that they were true in her hand, in her garden, on her particular set of cuts.
The summer was hot and dry. Bell pruned less and dead-headed more. The Niwaki was the favourite for dead-heading, the Felco for cutting back lavender after flowering, the ARS for the larger work on a young damson tree she had let get away from her the previous winter.
By August she had begun to notice the maintenance cost. The Felco she sharpened once a fortnight on a small carborundum stone, four strokes per side, taking about ninety seconds. The Niwaki she sharpened every three days, on a 1000-grit Japanese waterstone, taking about five minutes. The ARS she sharpened once a month, on the same carborundum stone as the Felco, taking about two minutes.
The Niwaki's edge was always the best. It was also always the most work. A gardener who wants the keenest cut in a garden of any size will pay for it in time at the bench, with a damp stone and a careful wrist. A gardener who wants a tool that works reliably for thirty years without much fuss will not regret a Felco.
By the end of September one of the three pairs had failed. It was not the one Bell had expected. The Felco's spring popped out and disappeared into a flowerbed during a session of cutting back herbaceous perennials on a Friday afternoon in mid-September. She replaced it from a spare she kept in the kitchen drawer, but the loss of forty seconds of work, and the small relief at being able to fix it on the spot, told her something about the value of repairability that no specification sheet could.
October was wet again. Bell did her hedge work in the second week, took the apples down to a manageable winter shape in the third, and gave the borders a hard cut-back in the fourth. By the last day of October she had run all three pairs through the full season.
She would, if asked, recommend the Felco No. 2 to any beginning gardener who wanted one pair of pruners that would last a lifetime and never need replacing, only repairing. She would recommend the Niwaki to any gardener who already owned a Felco and wanted a finer tool for the most delicate work. She would recommend the ARS to a gardener with small hands or long days, who needed the most comfortable grip available at a working price.
On the last day of October Bell laid the three pairs out on her kitchen table, photographed them with her phone, and wrote up the season in the small notebook. The Felco showed the most surface wear and the cleanest blade. The Niwaki showed two small chips along the cutting edge and the keenest face. The ARS showed almost nothing, as if it had been used for an afternoon rather than seven months.
She does not have a single answer. She thinks, after a year of carrying three, that the question of the best bypass pruner is the wrong question, and that the better question is which pair the gardener will actually pick up on a Tuesday morning in November when she has thirty minutes and a row of roses to cut back before lunch.
For Bell, this winter, that pair is the ARS. By March it may be something else.