I'll start by saying I don't know the answer to your question, and now I'll just babble for a bit. In general, many plants will go 'vegetative' again if you cut them back before they flower. Right now I have 3 types of kale that are 1 year+ The first is a tree collard - so that's expected to live 5 years. The others are lacinato & standard curly green kale. All three are now enjoying their second winter with lush growth. The tree collard has been flowering and now the lacinato is about to flower. I was told to take cuttings when the tree collard goes to flower, so I snipped them and have a bunch in a rooting mix (peat, fine woody compost & potting soil). I don't see any roots yet, but none of the small leaves have wilted, so I think they will do fine. There are also another bunch of florets coming up, so I guess I'll take more cuttings. I could eat them like broccoli, but I'd rather make more plants. I could't resist to let at least few flowers go to seed, even though these are generally propagated vegetatively. What I really want to do is hybridize the tree collards with the lacinato, to improve the taste of the tree collards. Now it looks like they will both be flowering at the same time, so I might just have a chance at it...

The latest research shows that the best time to prune roses in California is during the summer growing season. Contrary to conventional wisdom and popular belief. Roses should be pruned as you would any flowering shrub. After each flush of bloom, prune out the spent flowering canes and skinny canes back to where they're larger than a finger. If you do this after each flush of bloom, you won't have a bunch of scraggly canes that need serious doctoring come winter. And we don't prune back roses, at any time, to short nubbins. That's a practice that evolved back east and in the midwest where winter cold and snows forced rose gardeners to cut their roses back hard so that they could cover them with piles of mulch and burlap and god-knows-what-all-else. We don't need to do that. Again, prune roses just back to good finger-size canes, usually pruning roses no more than 1/3 to 1/2 depending on their vigor. We should have BIG rose BUSHES, just as we have big BUSHES. Also, the fact is that in most of California, our roses don't actually go fully dormant. We read about this in gardening magazines every year -- "ways to make your roses go dormant" (cut off water, fertilizer, leave the hips on, etc.). If you know about the genetics of modern roses, you know that one of the primary parents is Rosa chinensis. And R. chinensis is a subtropical to tropical species that is pretty much evergreen in the wild. But there's a reality here: you've asked your question because you probably haven't done your summer pruning as noted above and you're ready to go in and do some winter "dormant" pruning of all that scraggliness. If you can't find a good calendar for pruning for your area (it varies), simply watch your rose bushes. As soon as you see even the slightest bit of bud swelling and/or new growth, have at it. Just be careful. Joe

Shearing-type pruning,m which is often done on shrubs with tiny foliage, like box, is usually done, like Mike said, during the growing season. What you're contemplating is actual structural pruning. I'm no boxwood expert but I'd tend to think of this the way I do all regular pruning-best done late winter/early spring. +oM

About two years ago! Look like they are Ilex 'Dwarf Burford', or maybe 'Needlepoint'. Generally you cut these back about 3 to 4 inches each year if you want them small. In other words, a little every year. I would have done drastic cuttings back in February-March. Not sure if they'll put out a lot of new growth now if you cut them back, however it's likely, since you have a long growing season in Atlanta, and these are fairly hardy plants. Hopefully someone with more drastic-pruning experience will chime in.