Go to helpmefind.com/roses to compare the two Knock-Outs. Caldwell Pink would be a good rose for your driveway; if you leave for two weeks in heat of summer it will cope just fine, and as a bonus the foliage is pretty in the fall. If you want a rose that's beautiful and fragrant up close, makes a good hedge, and you can cut it for the house-- Quietness. You'd only need a couple for a 12 ft. bed; she's a spreader. You'll have to do a lot of pruning to keep your Knock-Outs to the desired height, I believe these others may be easier to manage. One more-- worth seaking out-- is Lovely Fairy which is reblooms steadily in a nice deep pink and has really pretty, dense shiny foliage. That will stay under 4 ft. for you too. Have fun looking at the pictures and reading the comments on Help me Find. (If I set about to plant a red hedge I'd go lower and plant Martha Gonzales which is beautiful even in the winter. She's short tho).

Since you don't have any forsythias to go by you'll need to keep an eye on it and when you start to see the little leaf nodes growing you can go ahead and prune it. I would, however, suggest you go with Jim's advice and not prune it all that much. I know it looks gangly but it needs time to fully mature. For most roses that's a good 3 years at least and for some slower growers it could be as long as 5. It's building a good root ball so it can support more top growth. When it feels it has enough roots it will begin to put out more canes. I had Easy Does It and it was not a fast grower for me.

Do you have a photo? Without a photo no one can say for sure what it is. If you really think it is rrd and can't take a photo. I would go out and cut off that cane as low as you can to the ground. Bag it and get it out of your yard. If you hold the cane in one hand while cutting with the other it's easier to get it straight into a bag. Then if the rest of the rose looks good you can wait and watch ti closely to see how it grows. Should you wish to be extra safe then cut the whole rose down. Bag and remove. Then you are safe to wait and see what grows back.

Hi Hollie I noticed you didn't get much response yet from your zone (I think you're in a warm climate like California) but I'll give you a seat-of-the-pants response. If the rose really wants to be 5-7' tall in your zone, you might be sacrificing bloom to try to get it to stay shorter. For instance, my Poseidon really doesn't want to bloom until it gets about 5' of growth on it, and trying to prune it shorter would make it bush out and put all of its work into regrowing those canes rather than blooming. Sometimes roses (like Austins in my zone) will bloom at shorter heights if you prune them back faithfully every few weeks but again if you prune down all the canes at once, you should expect about 6 weeks of down time before it starts blooming again. Here are a couple of options to consider if you really want these roses and want to try to keep them around 4.5'. First of all, don't just prune off the tops of the roses at 4.5' or they'll start branching out from wherever you cut them and make even more canes that are too tall. When you prune some of the canes, prune them way lower than you want them to end up (say 2') and let them bush out from that point toward the height you want to cap them at. I also wouldn't prune all the canes at once to this height, but instead do no more than a third of the rose at any given time so that you leave some canes to bloom, some to regrow cane, and some that you just recently cut. Instead of pruning canes that are too long, another option is to peg or stretch horizontally the canes that are getting too big. In my front yard, my husband wants me to keep the roses "neat" and no taller than our windows and yew hedges (maybe 3.5'). I'm fortunate enough in that bed to have several roses that really want to be bigger than this, so my go-to solution is to bend down any canes that stretch up beyond the height of the yews and hook that cane under handy canes of the rose next to it. That way the cane is still 5' long but it's only 3.5' tall because most of the height is stretching sideways. Eventually that sideways cane will put out more laterals toward its preferred height of 5', which I will then bend sideways and that lateral will put out more laterals, and the whole cycle starts again. This only works if you have some sideways room to work, and you're willing to put in some monitoring and maintenance of the canes as they grow. Another option would be to ask if there are roses in the color range you want that stay shorter naturally in your zone, and that's by far the easier route. Not all roses get massively huge, even in California, so it might be worth asking around. I'm no help here in zone 5 since it's a rare non-climbing rose that beyond 4.5' in my zone, particularly floribundas. In general floribundas are supposed to stay more compact than HTs but in California that's like comparing elephants to giraffes. Cynthia