We live in Houston but there's no houston.gardening group, so I hope you welcome
out of towners.

Forgive me, but neither my wife nor I are into gardening. We do the minimum we
can that keeps the shrubs and lawn from looking awful.

We have a lot of 20 year old wax leaf ligustrums that had gotten too large and
also looked sad as a result of some intractable leaf malady, so last year we cut
them back to the bone expecting them to die and we'd then dig them up. Instead
they came back and look much better - in fact about as good as ligustrums look.
Now my reason for posting . . .

Our experience was so rewarding we have some pittosporum, Japanese holly,
boxwood and camilla that we'd like to cut back a lot too. In this case we might
cut them back by half, but not back to stumps like we did the ligustrums.

Can we safely cut these plants back so radically?

jim