upon further inspection, more of my roses are budded out including my KO, High Voltage, Carefree Beauty & Kashmir all look the same. These guys have severe cane dieback so I have probably 2 feet of dead canes on them. They're green at the base where the leaves have been built up.

Dead canes don't do the rose any good: you can cut them off leaving your rose better looking and in no way compromised. For any kind of green pruning, you'd better wait for advice from someone who gardens in your zone, as I know nothing about possible results of pruning in earliest spring in cold zones.

In the past I've used the budding as a sign to prune and fertilize but it is a happening earlier this year so I'm interested in hearing additional responses as well.

Melissa thank you, I went ahead and trimmed off all the dead canes today!

zaphod, your roses are budding as well? I hope they don't end up freezing with a late snow here. Sometimes we have snow until May but right now it's hard to imagine since it's been so nice out!

There's also the rule of thumb to wait for the forsythia to bloom but I don't think its written in stone.

Ah I do not have forsythia so that would be hard for me to follow!

In somebody else's garden? Those tremendous fountains of early spring yellow are hard to miss. (Dirr reports flower kill from late frosts in Zone 5, however. It may limit the effectiveness of their bloom, which is totally unimpeded here.)

The last few years I haven't found following forsythia to be that effective for me. Maybe we don't have the slower incremental warm-up that other areas see. I tend to prune and fertilize based on what the canes are doing and the general weather and then the next week the forsythia are in bloom.

Thanks everyone!

I trimmed all the dead canes off my roses since they were all leafing out.

Except for my moss roses, most of my roses lost a large majority of their canes, due to our lack of snow and I didn't do any winter protection. The parts of the canes that did survive had leaves piled up at the base thanks to mother nature.

I hope we do not get any more negative temperatures! In the next 10 days we are supposed to drop into the high 20s overnight, otherwise during the day were staying in the 40s, 50s, and 60s with a few days in the 70s.

Seems like everything is eager to come back from winter. When I was cleaning up in the garden I noticed some of my clematis poking their heads up already.