Walk your tree in winter and look at last year's cuts. The good ones you spot straight away: a smooth circle with a ridge of new bark around it, closing a little further every year. The bad ones look different. There sits a three centimetre stub, the bark on it grey and loose, the wood behind it black. Or the cut sits too deep against the trunk, and four years on the wound is still open.
The stub is rarely a mistake in your head. It is a mistake in your hand. Secateurs that do not cut the shoot but crush it between two blunt blades. Loppers you lever at four centimetres until the branch tears, instead of falling. A bow saw that cannot reach the branch collar in tight growth, so you settle two hand widths further out.
One thing at a time: which tool really handles which diameter, where the cut sits on the branch collar, why heavy limbs come down in three steps, and what you do with the blade between one tree and the next. Tools and cutting technique are the same on apple (Malus domestica) as on pear, sweet cherry and damson. The timing is not: pome fruit is a winter job, stone fruit is cut during or right after harvest.
At a glance
- Bypass, not anvil. A bypass secateur cuts past itself like a pair of scissors and leaves a smooth face. Anvil types press the shoot against a metal plate and crush the vessels. For living wood you take bypass.
- Four tools cover almost everything. Secateurs up to about thumb thickness, geared loppers up to roughly 4 cm, a pull saw above that, a pole pruner everywhere the ladder no longer stands safely.
- The cut sits on the branch collar, neither in front of it nor behind it. That ridge at the base of the branch is the workshop for closing the wound. No stub, but do not cut into the collar either.
- Heavy limbs come down in three cuts. Undercut from below, removal cut from above further out, then the clean cut at the collar. That way the bark does not tear a metre down the trunk.
- You can leave the wound sealant on the shelf. The tree closes the wound itself if the cut sits right. What you really need: a sharp blade and 70 per cent alcohol for the move to the next tree.
Why crushing costs more than a crooked cut
A shoot is not a piece of batten. Directly under the bark lie the vessels and the cambium, the thin growing layer that forms the new wound margin. A sharp blade parts that layer cleanly, and the tree starts building callus at the edge of the face, new tissue that grows over the wound from the outside in.
A blunt or badly designed blade does not part anything, it presses. The tissue tears across several millimetres instead of ending on a line. That crushed zone dies. The tree has to wall it off before it can even begin to close over, and it is exactly during that time that fungal spores are sitting on the face.
You see the result the following summer. Cleanly cut spots have a clear ridge after a year. Crushed spots stay flat, often dark, and sometimes the shoot below is dead outright. The groundwork of winter pruning is covered in detail in the article on fruit tree pruning; this piece is about what sits between your head and the tree.
The four tools and where each one stops
- Bypass secateurs up to about thumb thicknessTwo blades that glide past each other, plus a strong spring. Anything up to roughly 2 cm goes in one stroke. If you have to press, twist or help along with both hands, the shoot is too thick for the tool. Models with separately available replacement blades last for decades.
- Geared loppers up to roughly 4 cmLong handles alone are not enough. A gear or a compound linkage turns a short handle travel into high force at the blade, and you get through without jerking. Bypass applies here too. Anvil models are usable on dead wood, not on living scaffold branches.
- Pull saw from about 4 cmA pruning saw with Japanese tooth geometry cuts on the pull, not on the push. The blade stays under tension and does not wander. In tight growth you guide it with one hand while the other holds the branch.
- Pole pruner with a telescopic shaftA curved saw and often a rope-operated cutter head on a shaft of 2 to 4 m. It gets you into the upper parts from the ground. Slower than working off a ladder, but far safer than the compromise of top rung plus outstretched arm.
The pole pruner is not a luxury
The shaft replaces those neck-breaking moments where you stand on the top rung and stretch your arm towards the branch that is still one hand width away. Guided from below the cut sits perfectly on the collar less often, but you keep both feet on the ground.
When you buy one, look at the weight and at how the shaft locks. Four metres fully extended feel heavy after ten minutes even at two kilos, and much above three kilos you can barely hold steady overhead. If you cut a lot of old trees, take two lengths rather than one shaft that has to do everything. What you additionally need overhead is further down, under ladders and footing.
The saw: pull rather than push
The bow saw from the hardware shop is built for firewood. The bow gets in the way as soon as two branches sit close together, and the frame also limits how deep into the branch you can get at all. In a tight branch angle the shape is the problem, not the sharpness.
A pull saw with Japanese tooth geometry is built differently. It has no bow frame, the blade runs slightly curved out of the handle, and the teeth bite on the pull stroke. That has two practical consequences. You can saw one-handed, because the force goes in the direction you are pulling anyway. And you can slide the blade between two tight branches and still start on the collar.
Folding saws with a 17 to 21 cm blade are enough for a garden. For scaffold branches over 10 cm take a fixed blade with a handle, otherwise the folding joint develops too much play. Chainsaws mostly stay in the shed on garden fruit trees: too coarse for a cut at the collar, and up in the crown without training a genuine danger.
The cut runs better once you take the weight off the branch
When sawing, the blade jams almost always for the same reason: the branch hangs in its own weight and closes the kerf. Hold it up lightly with your free hand, or take weight off heavy limbs beforehand. A jammed blade tears fibres instead of cutting them.
Cutting technique: the branch collar decides
At the base of every branch sits a ridge, the branch collar. From outside it looks like a wreath of folds, the place where branch bark and trunk bark meet. Inside it lies the tissue the tree uses to close the wound. Destroy the collar and the tree has lost its workshop, and the wound stays open for years.
Find the collar before you start the cut
Run a finger over the base of the branch. The wreath of folds is easy to feel. On stone fruit it is flatter than on apple, and on steeply rising branches it is drawn out longer on the upper side than below.Start just outside the collar
The cut face runs parallel to the collar, not parallel to the trunk. The collar stays completely intact, the stub disappears entirely. On a 5 cm branch that gives you around half a centimetre of room: past the outside of the collar, but not into it. Your hand manages that, you do not need a tape measure.Leave no stub
A stub has no tissue of its own that can grow over. It dies, the wood goes punky, and the rot travels inwards into the trunk. Where you leave a peg standing today, you have a cavity a few years later.But do not cut into the collar
The flush cut hard against the trunk, once sold as the textbook cut, takes the collar with it. The wound gets bigger than it needs to be, and closing starts with nothing to build on. You see it later as an oval wound that will not close at the top and bottom.Feel it over and tidy the edge
If the bark is frayed along the lower margin, trim it with a sharp knife, but only the loose fibres. Do not scrape the face, do not carve it.
How you recognise a good cut
The face is smooth and dry, no torn fibres, no crushed zone at the edge. All around the face the ridge of the collar stands unhurt. That way the tree starts closing over evenly all round, instead of first walling off dead tissue.
The comparison is easy to make. Look at the wounds of different years on your own tree. The spots that closed quickly all share one pattern, and so do the open ones.
Cut at the collar, neither in front of it nor behind it. The ridge stays, the stub goes.
The core rule for every branch cut
The three-cut method: so the bark does not tear along
A branch 8 cm across and two metres long weighs enough to snap off on the last centimetre of the cut and pull half a metre of bark out of the trunk. That wound is worse than any stub, because it runs lengthways, and lengthways is where a tree closes worst.
Undercut from below
About 30 to 40 cm out from the base, saw up into the branch from below, to roughly a third of the diameter and no deeper. This cut decides where a tear stops.Removal cut from above, a few centimetres further out
Start five to ten centimetres further out from above and saw right through. The branch falls at this cut. If it tears on the way, the tear only runs as far as the undercut and no further towards the trunk.The actual cut at the collar
Now only a light stub of about 30 cm is left hanging. You saw that off at the collar in your own time, one hand on the stub so it cannot tip at the last moment. If the limb is long and heavy, you will already have taken it down in two or three pieces at the removal cut, so all that hangs here is the short remainder.
Two conditions, not one: frost-free and dry
Below roughly minus 5 degrees the wood turns brittle and the wound margins break out more easily. Wait for a frost-free day; in a normal winter that costs you a few days of patience. The second condition is the one people forget: dry. European canker and fireblight enter through fresh wounds and need moisture to do it, so after rain you wait a day or two until bark and cut faces have dried off. Stone fruit you do not cut in winter at all. Sweet cherry and damson are done during or right after harvest, otherwise you invite gummosis and brown rot.
Ladders and footing
The most dangerous part of this work is not the blade, it is the height. A leaning ladder against the tree is the worst solution and the most stubbornly popular one: the trunk is round, the ladder slides sideways, and nobody holds it, because you are only going up for a moment.
A three-legged orchard ladder with a wide foot works better, it does not walk on soft ground, and a solid platform does the job on low crowns. Two firm rules that hold even when you are alone in the garden. First: both feet on one rung, and you only saw within the area you can reach without stretching. Second: no saw in your hand while climbing up or down, it goes in a holster or on a carabiner.
Working overhead with a pole pruner has rules of its own, and they are quickly told. Helmet and safety glasses, because sawdust and bits of bark fall exactly where you are looking. Stand to the side of the branch and never directly under it, because the branch comes down towards you when you saw straight upwards. Keep your way out clear, so move buckets, prunings and hose out of the way first. And electric telescopic tools stay well away from overhead power lines.
Above all that, an unromantic calculation applies. An old standard tree whose upper crown parts only start at six metres is a job for a tree surgeon with rope access. What that costs once is cheaper than a broken heel, and the tree gets a crown structure that will carry it for years. How crown shapes come about in the first place is in the article on formative pruning.
Wound sealant: the tin stays shut
Pruning paint stood in every garden shed for decades. The idea sounded reasonable: close the wound, keep the fungi out. Since the work of tree researcher Alex Shigo in the 1980s it has been clear that trees do not heal wounds like skin, they wall them off and grow over them. A coating does not help with that.
What actually happens: the coating develops fine cracks as temperatures swing, water runs under the layer and stays there. Shigo and Shortle's review of thirteen years of wound dressing trials shows that treated faces are infected no less often, and sometimes more often, than untreated ones. The tree also builds its boundary layer less well under the wax, because the face never dries out.
What experienced tree surgeons still do: on very large wounds from about 10 cm, treat a narrow strip on the outermost wound margin where the cambium sits, and leave the middle of the face open. For a normal branch cut in a garden you do not need even that. A cut that sits at the collar and is smooth does its work without help.
Look after the blade, disinfect the blade
Secateurs do not go blunt suddenly, they go blunt over a season. That is why you do not notice it, you simply press harder. Test it on a thin shoot: if it does not part in one stroke but the blade dents it first, the edge is due. How to hone shears and saws yourself is in sharpening and caring for garden tools.
The second point is the more important one, and it is the one usually skipped. Between two trees the blade carries pathogens along. Fireblight (Erwinia amylovora) on pome fruit and European canker (Neonectria ditissima) are the two that can genuinely cost you something in a garden. Fireblight attacks pome fruit, so apple, pear and quince, plus many ornamentals in the same family: hawthorn, cotoneaster, firethorn, rowan, medlar. Stone fruit is not affected. Infected shoots look black, as if burnt, and curl into a hook. That is why the same secateurs coming out of the ornamental hedge are a danger to the apple. Which other diseases sit in pruning wounds is in recognising fruit tree diseases.
Diseased tree first? No, diseased tree last
Always cut from healthy to diseased, never the other way round. On a tree with canker lesions you disinfect after every single cut: 70 per cent alcohol from the chemist, at least 30 seconds of contact time on a blade you have wiped clean first, because alcohol does nothing on resin and sawdust. Methylated spirit is around 95 per cent and works less well against bacteria than 70 per cent, so dilute it with water. If pome fruit shows shoot tips that look burnt, your first move is not the secateurs but getting the fireblight suspicion checked (in Austria through the local council or the appointed fireblight officer, in Switzerland in the low-incidence areas and the protected zones). If cutting then happens, the collar rule expressly does not apply there. Distance from the infection wins: at least 30 cm into healthy wood, better 50 cm, and the whole scaffold branch if that is what it takes, because the pathogen travels ahead inside symptom-free wood. Prunings from infected trees do not go on the compost heap or into the chipping pile, they go in the household waste or are burnt where that is allowed. Symptoms and look-alikes are in the article on fireblight.
For everyday work none of this is elaborate: a small spray bottle of spirit in your jacket pocket and a cloth with it. Moving from tree to tree, wipe once and spray. After the job, wipe the blade dry and put a drop of oil on the pivot, otherwise the spring seizes.
When to cut, and what works now in summer
The window for winter pruning on pome fruit runs from leafless dormancy until just before bud break, in practice from late November to late March · CW 47 to CW 13, on frost-free, dry days. The classic date is the late winter slot of February and March. The later in the window you cut, the more weakly the tree responds: as it warms, the stored reserves move out of roots and trunk into the branches, and whatever you cut off then you remove reserves and all. An early cut in December pushes the strongest regrowth, a cut in March puts the brakes on.
Today it is late July · CW 31, so the winter window is still ahead of you. What makes sense now: pull out water shoots, take away thin competing shoots, and cut the sweet cherry right after harvest, because stone fruit closes wounds far faster in the warm season. The details are in summer pruning on fruit trees. The peach falls outside this window; its turn comes in spring at flowering, roughly CW 11 to 16, when the open buds show you which wood is alive. How that works is in pruning peaches. On walnut, by contrast, late summer is the only good moment, because it bleeds heavily in winter.
And winter you use for what this article describes: the heavy limbs, the framework, the structure. A step-by-step walkthrough on a real tree is in winter pruning an apple tree. That is a good four months away. Time enough to sharpen the blade and check the ladder for loose rivets, ideally in October, so it is out of the way once the window opens.
When you are standing at the tree in winter, the hardest question is usually not how to cut, it is what you did last time. Which scaffold branch you already shortened, which wound is still open, which tree you cut last because of canker. That is exactly what we keep a garden journal for at Gartenkern: a photo of the cut and two sentences with it, and next February you know again where you were. After three winters you no longer have a hunch, you have the history of your tree.
Common questions about tools for fruit tree pruning
Which loppers really manage 4 cm?
Bypass or anvil, what is the difference?
Do I have to disinfect between every tree?
How close to the trunk do I cut?
Do I need pruning paint after cutting?
Is a chainsaw useful on a fruit tree?
Sources and further reading
- Fruit tree pruning: the groundwork of the winter cut
- Winter pruning an apple tree step by step
- Summer pruning on fruit trees
- Formative pruning and tree shapes
- Sharpening and caring for garden tools
- Basic tool kit for beginners
- Recognising and reporting fireblight
- Recognising fruit tree diseases
- Pruning peaches and nectarines
- Plant profiles: apple · pear · sweet cherry · damson · quince · peach · walnut
- Alex L. Shigo and Walter C. Shortle: Wound Dressings, Results of Studies Over 13 Years, Journal of Arboriculture 1983, and Shigo, Modern Arboriculture
- Bavarian State Institute for Viticulture and Horticulture (LWG): fruit tree pruning, groundwork and timing
- Julius Kühn Institute: fireblight, identification and control
- Chamber of Agriculture Schleswig-Holstein: European canker (Neonectria ditissima), infection conditions and prevention
On the duty to report fireblight
The legal position differs across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In Germany, fireblight has not been a quarantine organism since plant health law was reorganised, and the nationwide duty to report and control it has lapsed; authorities can still order measures case by case. In Austria there is a duty to report, and suspected cases go to the local council or to the appointed fireblight officer. In Switzerland the duty to report applies in the low-incidence areas and in the protected and buffer zones. When in doubt, ask your local council or the responsible plant protection service before you dispose of or fell an infected tree. And on safety at work: working on ladders and overhead carries a risk of falling, and large crowns you hand to a tree care firm.
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