I would stay away from vines on a chainlength fence. unless it is an evergreen vine that does not spread either by seed, berry, or underground growing roots; and which will not invade the neighbor's and your landscape beds and yard. Instead plant a mixture of screening tall but narrow growing trees and shrubs. also plant them in a manner where their canopies will not grow over or onto the neighbor's property. Otherwise, your neighbor will have legal rights to prune, in any nasty form or technique he wants, any part of your trees and shrubs canopies that either grow over, or spread onto his lot. Otherwise, you could install a berm between your lots, and strategically landscape it in a manner which makes it a pain for people to cross over into your yard without entering by walking to the far end of the berm and around. I live on a corner lot which my DH has refused to allow any fence to be built. Every morning Children and teenager walking to school would cut the shortest distance from the southwest front corner to the North east corner. That made a path which cut diaganally across my southern sideyard and eastern back yard. The only way I managed to stop that consistant trampling down of my soil, was to install a corner berm on my property which runs about 30 feet along the North sidewalk, turns the corner along the east side neighbor's driveway, and ends about 6 feet beyond where the neighbor's privacy fence begins and serves to divides my back yard from that neighbor's more narrow side yard. At first after I installed the berm, it seemed to be a magnet to attract children who loved to play bunker war games. By the next Spring, though I enough rambling and shrub type roses planted, along with dwarf shrubs and bulb flowers that the children no longer like to around them. It has even motivated the adults, who need to come into my yard for any specific reason, to go around instead of cutting straight across. At least it got rid of the foot traffic path angling across my back yard. I am currently in the process of planting a dwarf hedge of shrubs along the sides and front of my property to stop the children who ride their bikes across the north west corner of my front yard. The end result is not so much like a hedge to keep people out. It is instead, turning out to be more like a guided path that directs the children where to walk to more easily pass my house; compared to what it would take for them to continue passing in the same manner they used to on a regular basis, as they walked both to and back home from school. It also helps for when after school they walking to one of their friends who lives on a street situated between my house and the school. I am planting Lirope along the sidewalk, so that the shrubs will not spread so close that they crowd the sidewalk. I also am planting Shrub and HT roses on the front corners, and killing the grass to planting creeping phlox mulched and lined with rock between the sidewalk and the street. The end result is also a help for my DH, because the planting arrangement removes the need for him to continue doing the hard task of keeping sidewalks grooved and edged along the long west front and slightly shorter northern side of our lot.

Hi there! I just came across this discussion because I have a similar problem with an unsightly fence -- and more - next door. In my case, I need something tall and broadleaf to block a view that the douglas firs we planted will eventually block... in about five or six years! I'm thinking of using a hardy Southern Magnolia. If you are right about the abutter having the right to plant a vine on a neighbor's chain link fence, I may consider a Major Wheeler honeysuckle which stays evergreen in zone 6. I wanted to mention, since the subject of invasive plants has been raised, that in the case of Burning Bush or other invasive plants, what makes them invasive is not necessarily that they will sprout up elsewhere on your own property. Many aggressive plants that are also native will do that but they are not considered invasive. What happens with invasive plants, e.g. non-native escapees, is they sprout up in nearby woodlands and roadsides where no one is around to weed them and so they reproduce without any natural controls on them. I have three haggard looking winged eunonymous shrubs growing in my wooded backyard along with escaped Japanese honeysuckle, wineberry, Oriental Bittersweet and mulitiflora rose. There are a couple of Japanese barberry and a Japanese holly back there too. In recent months, I've also been fighting an English Ivy invasion. These invasions are all the result of seeds that either traveled by wind or bird poop into our yard from neighbors' houses in the past twenty years. I intend to weed them all out, but I'm dealing with the worst first: the honeysuckle. Japanese honeysuckle happens to be allelopathic and actively prevents other plants from growing with it. It will also grow in deep shade! By the way, what grows from seed is not the beautiful cultivated variety of the plants I mentioned, it's the weedier looking species variety! If you ever take a walk around the Six Mile Run Reservoir area in NJ in the fall, you'll see pale pink winged euonymous shrubs growing all over the place in the woods, displacing native plants. We can't always see the harm we are doing by planting invasive plants in our gardens. But others get to see it, and the natural environment suffers. Just thought I'd bring it up. I live in a part of NJ that suffers greatly from invasives and it's so hard to keep fighting the good fight. I just found out the arctic kiwi vines I planted last fall are invasive in NJ so now I have to rip them out. How I hate to take the life of a plant : (

Wow! You have a lot of potential here. As there may be code requirements, set back issues or other ordinances, this is a project that could really benefit from a professional landscape architect. It would be money well spent to ensure proper drainage and legal compliance. It could also help you plan the work in phases if the budget dictates.

This is one of those difficult, tight spaces that need an exact sized mask in order to block out the offending view without infringing on the good one. The trouble with most plants is that, if they are tall enough to block the view, they will not stop growing and will eventually become too tall, and probably too wide, which would either require a lot of maintenance to keep them in check, or they'd eventually fail at doing their job. A very tall fence could physically do the job of masking, but it in itself, would be or become ugly. And there are usually height restrictions on fences, making those over 6' illegal. It seems to me that your best chance of blocking the view without overdoing it is with a trellis ... a constructed support for vines. Since a trellis is basically a skeleton for a fluid-shaped plant's body, it will automatically provide a limit on how tall a vine can grow. A trellis can be as simple as vertical poles spaced at intervals. Or, it can have cross pieces attached to it. It needs to be stout enough to carry the weight of the future plant. Sometimes, trellises, if they are strictly utilitarian, are not in and of themselves, very good looking and rely on their plant covering to become attractive. They can be made attractive, though; it just takes more effort and $. Also, in conjunction with a trellis, explore if you can shift the view leftward by removing the willow-looking tree.