Perhaps the advice you read was to remove a fraction (1/3 or 1/4) of the oldest canes at the base every year beginning in year 4 or 5, to encourage new basal canes. With some roses, canes that are 1-3 years old are the most productive. I don't think this treatment is necessary with KO. Your plant looks plenty bushy to me, but if you want to experiment with various pruning regimes, just do it and see what happens. The plant won't mind.

Yes, I "hard prune" my Knockout roses every year - there are eleven of them, including the ones I prune in town garden planters - save for the two that I actually WANT to be 5' tall ! It's not clear in your post WHEN you pruned them (or, for that matter which Zone you are in), but here in Zone 6b, I'm usually pruning by mid-March, which allows plenty of time for new growth before June bloom. Pruning to only 1' is fairly severe - you're asking that plant to do an awful lot of hard work! - and personally, I opt for about a 2' pruning level. One of the beauties of "Knockouts" is that you can continue to judiciously prune them during the growing season (until late August here); check out the Rose Forum for some really expert advice on when, how and why to prune roses. Carl

Samson picture looks nice, very nice. Bet alabamaicole can ID every plant there. I enlarged the picture and could not. Scratched my head. You really got me worried about the roses getting rose rosette. I am planting a LARGE amount of roses and after reading here and other sources I will prune some for sure. I will start to space out the roses from each other. Just can not pass up a sale on anything. Cascade Rose 1974 (?) is by far my favorite. The start was given to me by a dear woman -Hazel- . She brought it to me in a hanging basket. Little did she know what a grand plant it was. She wanted to know if I wanted to do anything with it and boy did I. Sold and gave away countless ' rooted babies'. Enjoy taking one plant and multiplying it hundreds of times. Garlic is great anywhere and everywhere if snakes seem to be a problem. It is a great picturesque plant if given enough sunshine. There is lots of garlic here to dig to place around thru the roses..... In my head it looks just right. Thanks. It is difficult for me to connect the dots and then remember that I did, much less mix and match plants.

I thought maybe there was a reason why it got leggy already. I've heard high nitrogen fertilizer or even hard clay soil can cause those problems...Besides not enough sun...And winterkilled canes that were never pruned out...Rose bush itself not growing right...etc.... I have 7 Double Ko's and 5 are nice and bushy but two of them grew more lanky and runty so I replaced those two this year... (they were 3 years going on 4 same as our other ones came from same vendor and they got plenty of sun and were in good locations...) I transplanted them elsewhere this past late March so they can be runty if they wish now...lol But yes prune them back and see if that corrects the problem... Hopefully it does :)