Felco 2

The Felco 2 is a pair of bypass secateurs about 21 centimetres long, with handles of forged aluminium sheathed in red plastic. A curved, hardened steel blade passes close beside a shorter anvil blade with a groove for sap, and a black toothed wheel at the pivot sets the gap between them. A coiled spring opens the jaws, rubber stops cushion them as they close, and a thumb catch locks them shut.

Felco says the model was launched in 1948, three years after Félix Flisch, a mechanic, set up in a former watch-dial workshop at Les Geneveys-sur-Coffrane, in the Neuchâtel watchmaking country. His first patent, filed in 1945, already concerned secateurs adjusted by a toothed nut. Relais du Vin writes that the 1948 shears were lighter than their rivals because they were made of aluminium, and that their steel cutting parts could be exchanged rather than reground by a smith.

That principle of repair has defined the tool since. Felco's 1983 catalogue described the No. 2 as the best-selling professional pruner in the world and listed its replaceable blade, wire-cutting notch and geared adjustment; a Smith & Hawken catalogue of 1994 added the sap groove and the red grips. Today every part, down to the bushing and the spring, is sold separately, so that a pair bought decades ago can be rebuilt rather than thrown away. The firm has added rotating handles, left-handed versions and electric shears, but the No. 2 remains its standard pattern.

Vineyards, orchards and nurseries made the model their working tool, and amateur gardeners followed. Felco gives sales of more than 19 million and says the Felco 2 received the Swiss Grand Prix of Design in 2018. For the company's eightieth year it issued an edition with bare aluminium handles, as the maker describes the 1948 original: a reminder that the red coating is a later finish on an otherwise familiar tool.