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

I don't cut back the pseudostems. I only trim off the frosted leaves and use them to mulch the plant. Around here, any pseudostem over 4" diameter at the base don't get killed back to the ground and the 11" diameter pseudostems only lose the outer inch of diameter to the frost. In the sping, the new growth pops out of the top of the pseudostem and it carries on from where it left off in the fall. Here's a shot taken in April showing the banana mat in its winter mode. You can see the new growth appearing at the tops of the pseudostems. You can see the native white pines and the Blue Wall escarpment in the background. Here's a photo taken in September from the same location as the previous shot. Here's a picture taken of the interior of the mat with a patio chair included for scale.

I've been trying to keep on top of removing the dying foliage on the iris. It seems they mat down around the roots and collect debris, and I'm paranoid about getting any kind of rhizome fungus. I'll wait till it's a bit colder to cut the foliage into fans, but I definitnely want to remember to do it this year. I haven't in years past, and the leaves have trapped every tree leaf in a block radius -- leaving a soggy mess on the iris rhizomes all winter long! I've never really been much for cutting the herbs, Bill, but plants have stretched out and grown over the others, like waves on the beach. Unfortunately (especially with the lavender) these leads to long, grey, dead looking stems, with a fringe of green at the top. I'm experimenting; cutting some back severely, some just a little, some not at all. Advice and experiments are all we have to go one as gardeners, isn't it? Thanls for the advice!

Christina, My favorite time to cut them back is after they have just begun to leaf out. It saves me from spending time pruning back a dead lantana. After I'm sure they survived winter, then I prune them. I didn't check mine in the garden today because I was busy playing in the greenhouse. I'll check the lantanas in my garden tomorrow and see if they are leafing out. I'll let you know if they are. I'm quite a bit further south than you, and I think that most years mine don't leaf out until late March at the earliest and probably it is more often in April. Mine grow in amended clay and we've been continually wet since mid-June of 2014, so I have some degree of concern that mine might not have made it through the winter in perpetually wet clay. Most years they handle moist clay soil fine, but really wet clay is not their friend. I don't really have an answer for you on the boxwood as I don't grow it. Dawn