Felco No. 6 Pruning Shears Review

Overview

Felco has made secateurs in Switzerland since 1945 and describes itself as the inventor of the modern pruner. The No. 2 is the iconic full-sized model; the No. 6 is the slightly smaller variant designed for smaller hands and lighter work, which makes it the right Felco for most indoor plant care.

The jobs it is sized for are the routine ones in a UK houseplant collection: pruning Monstera, taking Pothos and Philodendron cuttings, deadheading Peace Lily flowers, dividing Spider Plant pups, and trimming back a leggy Rubber Plant.

Why Pruning Shears Even Matter

A bad cut is not just cosmetic. Crushed plant tissue heals slowly, opens the way for fungal infection, and produces visible callusing scars that don’t go away. A clean, sharp cut closes within days and is barely visible after a season. For propagation cuttings in particular, the difference between a clean cut and a crushed one is often the difference between roots and rot.

Cheap pruning shears do not stay sharp, and once dull they crush more than they cut. Felco shears stay sharp for years, and when they do eventually need it, you sharpen them yourself with a hand stone in ten minutes.

Design

The cutting blade is hardened steel, ground to a curved edge that slides past a stationary lower blade. This bypass design (like scissors) makes a clean shearing cut rather than the crushing cut of anvil shears. Felco rates the cutting capacity at 20mm — enough for any indoor woody stem you’d realistically prune.

The handles are forged aluminium in Felco’s familiar red, sized for medium hands — Felco’s own guide is a hand length of roughly 6⅞ to 7⅞ inches. The classic Felco lock — a small pivoting catch at the base of the handles — holds the shears closed when not in use. The spring is a simple wire coil that returns the blades to open after each cut; springs are among the spare parts Felco sells.

Performance

A sharp bypass blade slices rather than crushes, and across the stem sizes indoor pruning actually involves — from a 1mm Pothos vine to a 15mm Rubber Plant trunk cutting — that is the property that matters. A clean cut leaves undamaged tissue at the cut end, which is what a cutting needs to root rather than rot, and what lets a pruning wound on the parent plant close quickly.

Ergonomically, the No. 6 is lighter than the No. 2, with a shorter handle span sized for small-to-medium hands. The lock is a one-handed catch, and the coil spring returns the blades open after each cut.

Felco’s reputation rests on edge retention: a hardened steel blade holds an edge far longer than the blades on budget shears, and Felco’s micro-metric adjustment system lets you take up play in the cutting head as it wears rather than living with a loose tool.

Replaceable Everything

The under-appreciated case for Felco: it is designed to be fully repairable, with replacement blades, springs, and shock absorbers sold separately, and the forged aluminium handles carry a lifetime warranty. A pair bought today can be kept in service for decades with occasional replacement parts.

This matters for the cost calculation. A £60 Felco kept for 20 years is £3/year. A £12 supermarket shear that goes dull in 18 months and gets thrown away is £8/year and adds metal-and-plastic waste to landfill. The shear that lasts wins on both economics and embodied carbon.

Where Felco Isn’t the Right Buy

Three cases. First, someone who genuinely prunes their houseplants twice a year — the Felco is over-tooled for that level of use, and a £15 mid-range shear is fine. Second, work that’s finer than 3mm diameter — taking very small cuttings, deadheading delicate flowers, trimming individual leaf tips — is better done with small precision scissors, which the Felco isn’t trying to be. Third, if your hands are on the larger side or you’re regularly cutting past pencil-thickness (a maturing rubber plant’s woody stems, a fiddle leaf fig’s thicker growth), the No. 6’s 20mm capacity and compact handle will start to feel like the wrong tool — see the full-size Felco No. 2 instead.

For anyone propagating regularly, taking cuttings for friends, pruning a maturing plant collection, or doing seasonal hard pruning on woody indoor species — yes, Felco.

Sharpening

The honest thing about a Felco is that you have to sharpen it occasionally. Maybe once a year for indoor use. The technique is simple: a flat hand stone, run at a 20° angle along the inside face of the curved blade in steady strokes from base to tip. Five minutes. Felco sells a dedicated sharpening stone, but a generic medium-grit waterstone works fine.

If you don’t sharpen it ever, the shear gradually moves from “scissor-cleanly” to “needs more force” to “starts crushing stems.” Most owners notice at the force-increase stage and sharpen then.

The Verdict

The Felco No. 6 is the right pruning shear for any UK indoor plant keeper who’s serious about the work. Sharper than cheaper alternatives, more durable than anything in its category, designed to be serviced rather than replaced. Around £50–£70 buys a tool designed to be repaired rather than replaced. For very occasional pruning a budget shear is fine; for everyone else, this is the once-and-done purchase. See the propagation guides for what to actually do with them. For methodology see how we review.

Sources

• Felco: FELCO 6 product page — cutting capacity, length, weight, materials, hand size, micro-metric adjustment, repairability, warranty, “since 1945”.
• UK prices checked October 2026: World of Secateurs (RRP £69.99), The Vineyard Store.