Day 201: an alligator in the shed

Daily details from the garden to bring you inspiration throughout the year

Post contains affiliate links

Not an ad, but an enthusiastic response to the oddest looking bit of gardening kit that came in genuinely handy at the weekend. For reasons not too hard to fathom, Black & Decker refer to this as the Alligator, but you and I would probably think of it as a set of powered loppers. Essentially it’s set of scissor-action cutters with a very short chainsaw bar set entirely within its protective jaws – about as safe as a chainsaw will ever get (meaning that you could still do yourself or anyone else some serious damage, but you’d have to put your mind to it), and ideal when that particular tool would be overkill. Such as when tackling saplings or mature shrubs where you need to cut woody stems up to about 12cm in diameter – it’s doesn’t find its way out of the shed that often, but when it does, it’s such a time saver, and really made the job of tackling the overdue pruning of our philadelphus far less onerous a task that it might otherwise have been on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. Its only drawback is in having an electric cord* which, true to form, I managed to cut through in one of its earliest outings. I’m a little more careful now.

*A hasty web search reveals that there is a cordless version available, though I’ll stick with my patched-up wired model. We’ve been through too much together.


A year of garden coaching

To find out more about my my 12 month online garden coaching programme, please visit the website, where you can read more details and add your name to the waiting list to be the first to hear when enrolment opens up again for the spring.


Click here to sign up for daily #gardeninspo365 posts and blog updates direct to your inbox.


Sign up for the monthly newsletter below


Hello! I’m Andrew, gardener, blogger, podcaster, and owner of a too-loud laugh, and I’m so pleased you’ve found your way to Gardens, weeds & words. You can read a more in-depth profile of me on the About page, or by clicking the image above.

ko-fi