Tree Care Tools: The Complete Guide

Walk into any hardware store and the tree care aisle will sell you 40 tools you don’t need and hide the six you do. I’ve bought most of the junk over 20 years of taking care of the trees on my own lot, so let me save you the money and the shed space.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: the right tree care tool depends entirely on the job in front of you, not on what looks impressive hanging on the pegboard. A branch you can reach and that’s thinner than your thumb needs hand pruners. That same branch 15 feet up needs a pole pruner. A six-inch limb needs a saw, and a whole dead tree needs a chainsaw and probably a professional. So this guide is organized the way you actually think about the work, by the job, not by the product category.

Before you buy anything, it helps to know what you’re going to do with it. Our tree trimming tips guide covers the how and when of cutting, and if you’re planting rather than pruning, start with our tree planting tips. This page is about the gear.

Cutting by hand

Most tree care is hand-cutting, and most hand-cutting comes down to matching the tool to the branch diameter. Get this wrong and you either mangle the cut or strain your wrists trying to muscle through wood that’s too thick.

Hand pruners are the tool you’ll reach for most. They handle green stems up to about three-quarters of an inch, which covers the vast majority of shaping cuts, water sprouts, and small deadwood. Buy bypass pruners, not anvil, for any living wood. A pair of Felco F2 bypass pruners costs around 60 dollars and every single part is replaceable, so it’s the last pair you’ll buy. This is the one tool where I won’t let you go cheap. When you’re shaping fruit trees, good pruners make the difference between a clean heal and a ragged wound, and our guide to pruning fruit trees walks through exactly which cuts to make.

Loppers are hand pruners with long handles and more leverage, built for branches from three-quarters of an inch up to about an inch and a half. The long handles let you reach into a shrub or up into low branches and give you the mechanical advantage to cut wood your hand pruners would choke on. Bypass loppers for live wood, anvil loppers for deadwood. A quality pair runs 40 to 90 dollars depending on the gear mechanism.

Pruning saws and folding saws take over where loppers give up, roughly two to five inches of branch. A folding saw slips in a back pocket and the blade tucks away safe, so it’s the one I grab for a quick cut on a walk around the yard. A fixed-blade Silky-style saw cuts faster on bigger limbs. These saws cut on the pull stroke, which feels backwards for about ten seconds and then feels obvious. Expect to spend 25 to 60 dollars.

Manual hedge shears are for formal hedges and shrub shaping, not for trees. Those long scissor blades give you a clean flat line across soft new growth up to about pencil thickness. If you’re cutting anything woody with hedge shears you’ve picked the wrong tool. A pair of Okatsune or similar Japanese shears will outlast three cheap pairs.

For a deeper look at each of these, see our full guides to hand pruners, loppers, and pruning saws. If you’re still not sure which one a specific cut calls for, our pruning tool decision guide sorts it out by branch size.

Reaching high branches

The branches you can’t reach from the ground are where most homeowners either overpay an arborist or hurt themselves on a wobbly ladder. The fix is a pole tool, and there are two kinds.

Manual pole pruners put a bypass cutting head and often a small saw on the end of a pole that extends from about 6 to 16 feet. A rope or lever works the cutter, so you make the cut with your feet planted on the ground. This is the safest way to take a branch that’s 12 or 15 feet up, and it’s the tool I’d hand any homeowner before I’d hand them a ladder. The cutting head handles branches up to about an inch and a quarter, and the attached saw takes the thicker limbs. Knowing when to trim your tree matters as much as the reach, so cut in the dormant season for most species.

Powered pole saws put a small chainsaw bar on the end of the pole, gas or battery powered, for when you’ve got a lot of high cuts or thicker limbs than a manual pruner can handle. A battery pole saw runs 150 to 300 dollars and saves your shoulders on a big pruning day. The tradeoff is weight and the fact that you’re now running a spinning chain over your head, so this is a step up in both capability and risk. If you’ve only got two or three high cuts a year, the manual pole pruner is plenty.

Bigger jobs and removal

This is where the tools get serious and where I’ll be honest with you: some of these jobs belong to a professional. A homeowner with a chainsaw and no training is how emergency rooms stay busy. Know your limits.

Chainsaws cut anything a saw can’t, from bucking up a fallen limb to felling a small tree. Battery saws in the 14 to 16 inch bar range now handle most homeowner work, run quiet, and start with a button instead of a pull cord fight. Gas saws still win for all-day work and big wood. Either way, chainsaw chaps, a helmet with a face shield, and gloves are not optional. A tree over about six inches at the base, or anything near a structure or power line, is a job for a licensed arborist with insurance, not a Saturday project.

Powered hedge trimmers run a reciprocating blade for long formal hedges where manual shears would take all afternoon. Battery trimmers handle a typical suburban hedge on one charge. Match the blade length to your hedge and keep both hands on the machine. For the technique side of keeping a hedge tight and healthy, see our hedge trimming guide.

Wood chippers turn your brush pile into mulch, which sounds great until you price one. Renting a chipper runs 100 to 300 dollars a day and they’re genuinely dangerous machines. For most homeowners, hauling brush to a green-waste drop or renting a chipper for one big cleanup day beats owning one. If you’re clearing a lot of growth every year, the math changes.

Stump grinders chew a leftover stump down below grade so you can replant or lay sod. Rent one for 100 to 200 dollars a day, or pay a service 100 to 400 dollars per stump depending on size. Grinding is loud, throws debris, and takes practice. It’s a fine DIY rental for one or two stumps if you wear eye and ear protection and clear the area of rocks first.

Watering, feeding, and protecting

Cutting tools get all the attention, but the gear that keeps a young tree alive is cheaper and more important. A tree you planted this year lives or dies on water, and the first two summers are the whole ballgame.

Tree watering bags zip around the trunk and drip 15 to 20 gallons out slowly over several hours, which soaks deep instead of running off the surface. For a newly planted tree in a hot-summer climate, this one 25-dollar bag does more good than any tool on this page. Our guide to watering newly planted trees covers how often to fill it through that critical first year.

Soil moisture meters are a cheap probe that tells you whether the root zone is actually wet or just wet on top. For 15 dollars it settles the single most common argument in tree care: am I watering too much or too little. Push it down to root depth and read the dial before you water.

Soil test kits tell you your pH and nutrient levels before you dump fertilizer the tree doesn’t need. A basic kit runs 15 to 25 dollars, or your county extension office will run a real lab test for a small fee that’s worth more than any home kit. Test before you feed, especially for fussy trees like citrus and blueberries that care about pH.

Tree wraps and trunk guards protect thin young bark from sunscald in winter and from string trimmers and lawnmowers year round. A hard plastic trunk guard stops the number one killer of young trees on maintained lawns, which is the mower operator who nicks the bark once a week until the tree girdles itself.

Tree stakes and ties hold a new tree steady only if it genuinely needs it, and most don’t. A tree that flexes in the wind builds a stronger trunk than one lashed rigid. When you do stake, use a soft wide tie, stake loosely enough to let the trunk sway, and pull the stakes after one growing season. Our guide to the best knot to stake a tree shows the tie that won’t strangle the trunk.

Planting and access

Getting a tree in the ground and getting yourself safely up into one both come down to a couple of well-chosen tools.

Planting tools start with a good round-point shovel for digging the wide shallow hole a tree actually wants. A spade cuts clean edges, a mattock breaks up hardpan and clay that a shovel bounces off, and a hand auger or an auger bit on a drill speeds up digging in soft soil. In our Sacramento clay I use the mattock more than the shovel, because the top foot of ground bakes into concrete by July. Dig the hole twice as wide as the rootball and no deeper than the roots sit.

Orchard and tripod ladders are built for standing in soft ground next to a tree, which a regular A-frame ladder is not. The three-leg design plants firmly on uneven dirt and the tapered top slips in among branches. A wobbling stepladder on lawn is how people fall, so if you’re working in a tree more than once or twice a year, a proper tripod orchard ladder is worth the 150 to 300 dollars. Better still, use a pole tool from the ground and skip the ladder entirely.

Maintenance and safety

A sharp, clean tool cuts better, lasts longer, and spreads less disease than a neglected one. Five minutes of care after each job is the cheapest upgrade you can make to any tool you already own.

Sharpening keeps cuts clean, and a clean cut heals faster and resists disease better than a torn one. A carbide sharpener or a small diamond file touches up pruner and lopper blades in a few strokes. Saw blades are trickier, and most homeowners just replace a worn saw blade rather than file it. Sharpen when the tool starts tearing instead of slicing, which for a homeowner is usually once a season.

Cleaning matters more than people think, because pruning tools spread disease from one tree to the next on the blade. Wipe sap off with a rag, and when you’re cutting on a tree you suspect is diseased, dip the blades in a 10 percent bleach solution or wipe them with 70 percent alcohol between cuts. A drop of oil on the pivot and the spring after cleaning keeps everything moving and stops rust.

Staying safe is the part that actually matters. Eye protection every time, hearing protection for anything powered, gloves for grip and splinters, and chaps and a helmet for chainsaw work. Never cut overhead on a ladder, never cut toward yourself, and never run a chainsaw alone or over your head. The trees will still be there tomorrow. For the bigger picture on keeping a whole yard of trees healthy through the seasons, mklibrary.com has a solid seasonal yard maintenance guide that pairs well with the tool side of things.

Buy the four hand tools first. Add reach and power only when a real job demands it. Keep everything sharp and clean, and most of this gear will outlast the trees you bought it for. For the actual sharpening steps, our guide to sharpening pruning tools covers the angle and stroke count for pruners, loppers, and saw blades.