Pervis asked how to help his rhododendrons that are older, location abused, and surviving despite that. Understand the value of attention that Pervis has given this season is priceless. Yes, attention makes a difference in how plants grow and has been over and over proven despite the nonbelievers. Always worked for a weed like me too, but back to Pervis. It’s very helpful to add a fertilizer sometimes with all that love so let's think about that a minute. I always have been a Scotts advocate since they provided much of my early training back in the 70’s. Imagine a time when to sell a product, they required you to stay in Columbus for 5 days and be trained in their training facilities each year, Nirvana! Accordingly, I like this product available on Amazon and everywhere else:

If you fertilize every shrub, you will make them grow more and then probably need to trim them more often, so let's not do that. If a shrub needs a hand or if you, as Pervis, take a special interest in part of your planting that is struggling, then this is the ticket.

When? For a sick shrub I like to use the fertilizer as a tonic 3 times a season. One approaches which is within a week or so of a killing frost. The second is the week following Thanksgiving and the last is after Mother’s Day in the spring or the last frost.

How? The scientific term for this method is "feed the chickens." Pour some in your hand and throw it under the outer part of the shrub canopy at a rate of a cupped handful per 2 feet of shrub height. Also remember the value to you and the shrub doing this with awareness of the beneficial outcome you are manifesting. Pervis has this part down perfect.

I am continuing to learn from your interactions and help from some of the WV staff as well but there just aren’t any easy answers or consensus yet, so this will continue. Might it help to do the fertilization as just taught? I’m not saying "do it" but it certainly can’t hurt.

At this point, I would not remove a few of many boxwoods because you may bring home new issues. If they are basically 80% dead you could remove and leave the space open but its possible we will need to replace with non-boxwoods so we could be looking at removing other plants to create some sort of pattern.

Pruning for the new season? Here again I reached out to Dr. Bearce for his wisdom. Basically on a boxwood, you can’t cut beyond the green level if you are shearing and if you are using clippers, you would cut the dead out to a crotch so you would be building some pretty holy shrubs.

Most importantly, you would want to disinfect your shears and clippers either between shrubs or rows of shrubs depending on your level of analness. Yes, one of my favorite made up words but we all get it. Also, bag and remove all the leaves left for winter. Google your favorite disinfectant and proceed with caution.