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

My lantana take forever to leaf out...so don't give up on them too soon. I would probably (I will) wait until Easter or so to cut mine back. Give us a chance to get through any last freezes.

Someone else probably knows more than I do about boxwood, but I don't see any reason you can't trim that one back.

Someone posted on the FB group about trimming back their roses. ACK, I haven't even thought about those yet! (but I need to!)

Lisa, I've been letting the cold weather prune my roses, which have been trying to leaf out since we hit the upper 70s in January. The roses leaf out during a warm spell, then a freeze prunes them back. The weather warms up and the same thing happens again.....and again.....and again. I guess maybe this week I'll prune them back before it is too late to do a proper pruning, and then the late cold spell at the end of the month may prune them back again. Graham Thomas, in particular, has been overly eager to get growing and blooming and he is 10 years old in my garden this year so you'd think he would have learned the perils and pitfalls of leafing out early by now.

I lightly pruned some trees yesterday and I was a little leery but most of it was dead branches so I hope they will not be hard on them. One tree had a lot of thin wispy braches so I snipped those off to have only one main trunk coming up. I need to learn how to do this confidently since we have 8 trees so far.