PAEAN TO A PRUNER
I slammed through three midlife crises before I was 30. Four if you want to count the time I decided to quit my editing job and grow cut flowers--golden coreopsis, pastel statice, baby blue bachelor’s buttons and the like--in a community garden plot at the local college.
My wife, Jan, was very patient through all this. I’d turn wormy mulch into the pan-hard soil while she kept me company sitting in a frayed garden chair, practicing French idioms (“Allons, bouge ton cul, le pere Lansing,” was one of her favorites, particularly when I was sweating like a prizefighter) because I’d told her a few years earlier, during my second, or maybe third, crisis that I was moving to France.
I had exactly two clients in my nouvelle cut flower business: the cafe at a tennis club and a gourmet chocolate shop. For the tennis club I would make up a dozen table centerpieces and deliver them every Wednesday morning. My fee was $40 a month. Almost as lucrative was the chocolate shop. In the half light of dawn I’d cut riotous masses of silky ranunculus and thunderous freesias, wrap them in cellophane, and sell three or four bouquets for $5 a pop. Twice a week. I was grossing an easy $200 a month before expenses, which included leasing the garden plots, buying seeds, bulbs, fertilizer, tools. The only thing free in this ghastly exercise was my labor.
I did this for six months, which is generally how long my typical midlife crisis lasted, and not once did Jan call me a twit, a fool, or an idiot, in either English or French. If growing flowers is what I wanted to do, then so be it. We might be poor, but at least we’d never be at a loss for a hostess gift.
I was, at the time, approaching my 30th birthday and, acutely aware of our dwindling finances, I swore Jan to simplicity. Forget the presents, I said. Instead, like an O. Henry character, she pawned a pearl necklace given her by her grandmother and bought me a pair of flower pruners. Not just any pruners, mind you. But a pair of Felco 2s. The best pruners in the world. And, at $40 to $50 retail, the most expensive.
You must understand one thing about the Felco 2 bypass pruner, or secateur, as the French, and my wife, call it: It is the perfect tool. It is to professional gardeners what the wasp-waisted 1958 Ferrari 250 Testarossa is to automobile aficionados, only better designed. Hold it in your hand. Notice its perfect balance? How the handles feel as comfortable as a pair of well-worn kid gloves? Open it. Now squeeze. Remarkable, yes? The blades do not stick and there is even pressure throughout your hand and forearm as you close them. That is because of the volute spring, a spiraling wonder that somehow equalizes the amount of squeeze necessary to slice through a woody rose cane or deadhead zinnias.
Probably the most remarkable attribute of Felco 2 pruners is that they have remained relatively unchanged since Felix Flisch, a Swiss tinkerer, designed and forged his first aluminum alloy pair in his small workshop in 1948. “He made them for a nurseryman after the war,” says Peter Hillbricht, who grew up near the Felco factory in the heart of Switzerland’s Jura region. He now lives outside of Seattle, where since 1986 he has been the sole distributor of Felco pruners in America.
Hillbricht has never had a contract with Felco. He simply tells the Swiss manufacturer two years in advance how many pruners he needs. And that is that.
“But the tool,” says Hillbricht, lowering his voice to a lover’s whisper, “is elegant, don’t you think?”
I do. And I am not alone. According to Hillbricht, there isn’t a nursery or vineyard in the country that doesn’t use Felco pruners. “They’re the dominant tool in Napa,” according to Bob Denman, who makes Red Pig garden tools in Orange County and is known in the gardening trade as the original Mr. Tool Guy. “They’re very light and it takes very little pressure to squeeze them. That’s important to the people who prune vineyards and make 35,000 cuts a day for six days a week.”
But there is something else about the Felco 2, something that has less to do with ergonomics and more to do with the aesthetics of a favorite baseball cap or coffee mug. As simple as they are, they somehow weasel their way into your life and soon become indispensable.
“I’ve collected Felcos over the years,” says Kathy Brenzel, senior garden editor for Sunset magazine. “They fill a basket by my back door; I grab one as I head outdoors in the evenings to cut flowers or to snip off spent blooms. Often I find a pair tucked under a perennial nearly buried in mulch, or lying splayed open in the damp earth of my raised beds where I left it one fevered gardening day months or seasons ago. Rusted or not, it still works. My found-again hand pruners are like old friends who’ve gotten caught up in their lives elsewhere, then reappeared to help me finish a job.”
Though I’ve only had a single pair, I feel the same way. Having survived midlife crisis number three or four, I gave up on the cut-flower business and sold off my supplies. But I held on to my Felco pruners. They became the only hand tool I’ve ever owned that I essentially wore out and decided to repair rather than replace. Twice I have misplaced them--once allowing them to winter beneath an overgrown variegated pittosporum, another time losing them, somehow, in a pile of chipped bark, where they hibernated for more than a year. Both times I secretly mourned.
When discovered, the spring was rusty and the bright red handles (intended to make them easier to find) had peeled and faded to an unearthly pinkish gray. It took only 30 minutes to disassemble the pruners, clean with a wire brush and replace the volute spring, which, like each of the 20 parts that make up a Felco 2 pruner, is replaceable. Then I submerged the handles in Plasti Dip, let them dry overnight, and they were good as new. Better, since the handles were nicely worn in.
It has been a while since I’ve felt the need to move to Paris or sell the house and start something like a buffalo ranch. But lately Jan has become a little peevish and moody. Last week, for instance, she bought two framed Audubon prints and, as soon as she got them, wrapped them back up and hauled them into the rafters in the garage. “They remind me of my grandmother’s house, which I used to hate,” she said. “But what scared me is I liked them.”
As I write, Jan’s birthday is approaching. I will take her to her favorite restaurant and, while sipping on a very nice bottle of Bordeaux, watch as she opens up the leather pouch containing a strand of glistening pearls similar to the one her grandmother gave her years ago. When we get home, I’ll wait for a quiet moment before giving her her own pair of Felco 2s, a gift that is perfectly elegant and, with luck, should help her cut through more than just a thorny branch or two in the years ahead.
