I don't know about your sun/shade issues & my zone is colder and my season shorter than yours, but I just cut my Sweet Kate spiderwort to the ground today. SK is an early starter with lovely foliage for early spring bulbs. Her blooms were totally spent & I should have done her a week ago. My Zwanenburg Blue spiderworts (in 3 different areas with varying sun/shade) have not finished yet. They won't be cut for probably two more weeks. Both of these spiderworts usually regrow and come back in bloom for me sometime in late August (maybe early September this cold summer) and stay nice till a hard snow/freeze.

I've had some of the foliage issues on one particular rose and after the first flush of bloom, if the foliage is getting ugly, I have cut the whole rose back to about 6 inches off the ground. I am not an expert rose grower by any means, it's just the easiest way for me to live with roses, without using any sprays. The rose has always come back for me and sometimes I get another flush of bloom later in the season. And they are growing in a perennial bed so by the time I'm ready to be done with the foliage, there are other plants around them getting large enough to hide the missing rose.

This is the time to work on your soil. Add compost, manure and good mulch. Keep the roots in good shape. Roses always do better with rain than hose water. You should see what the drought is doing to my roses in CA. The year it rained and rained was my best year ever. But roses want sun and warmth too. If you have been using chemical fertilizers instead of natural ones then you might want to give your soil some TLC while the roses take a break.

Hi butterflywing It sounds like you have two issues with your (presumably) Knockouts that are a little different than the OP's - how high off the ground the branches start, and how big the bush gets. There may be some strategies to help with at least one of these issues, but depending on where you live it's hard to make too drastic a change in how big a rose wants to get. It would help us to let us know your region of the country and we can give you more specific advice. For the first issue of how high the branches start, it's possible that trimming it down to 6" might encourage it to branch out a little lower, but for some roses it might not. I routinely have to prune most of my roses to the ground or nearly there most years, and some roses simply want to get big on one cane before they start branching out. Other times, you can get branching out like a candelabra from wherever you last pruned it, and you definitely want to prune those kinds of roses low at first so the candelabra isn't far off the ground. In my experience, Knockout isn't a particularly prone rose for doing the candelabra thing, but branches more or less where it wants to. In your zone, it may act different than in mine - it's sometimes hard to generalize about a given type of rose. As for its ultimate height, it sounds like even if it branched out lower it wouldn't fit where you have it if it still gets to 6' high and 4' wide. That's something I'd frankly like to see in my knockouts, so I expect you're in a warmer zone than mine. I find that I can encourage a rose to be maybe a foot or so lower than it really wants to be with diligent pruning, but if it really wants to be 6' in your zone it's not going to stay happily at 3'. Given that you say it's not acceptable as it is in that spot, I don't see a problem with trying to prune it low, perhaps as low as 6' off the ground. It will definitely reduce its blooms for quite a while as it recovers the canes, and it might sulk and return to its old habits. If it's a choice between digging it out entirely or giving it a chance to "shape up", I'd opt for giving a try. Just realize that if it keeps stretching back to 6' it isn't necessarily something you did or didn't do, just how the rose is fitting in to your conditions. At that point, you may want to log in with a new thread here and see what kind of rose might stay at a better size for you in your zone. Hope that helps Cynthia