I'm not sure how trumpet vine behaves in your area, I know it's extremely aggressive, to invasive in some areas. You may want to research that a bit more before you commit to planting that one. In my area people are lucky to keep it alive!

I know some might consider the following suggestion to be a huge no-no but have you considered the much reviled Virginia Creeper for the stockade fence? If you back up to pasture that might not be best. Really depends on the growing conditions. However in our yard we have an area that receives blistering sun all day long and is pure clay fill. I would not even refer to is as soil. The one and only thing that will grow out there is Virginia Creeper. It will grow in the conditions you describe and should fill in fairly quickly.

My only caveat again is that if you don't think it can be controlled or kept trimmed you may want to think twice. It can be and frequently is quite aggressive but a very fun plant in a controllable environment.

Kate

kate, i like va creeper ; have one growing up a mature maple(am adding one of the hydrangeas to that same tree) and have a few variegated ones that are soooooo slowwwww to grow. but in this case, the 3 plants i listed are the ones i am going to work with in the 2 locations mentioned.

I have two Trumpet vines, Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen' & Campsis radicans ' Flamenco'. I wasn't sure if this is the kind of vine you meant or not when you said Trumpet vine. Anyway, if they are the same kind of vine, mine are both vigorous growing plants with one really nice advantage. They can climb a rough surface without any help from me. Although I have them on trellises, they actually hug the brick wall by themselves. They each cover a 3-4 foot wide space (could be more if I let them) and climb way past the trellises and up to the eaves of the house. I cut them back to the trellis level once or twice a season. Easy to do since I can pull them off the house by separating them from the wall at the top of the trellis height and giving one good tug on a bunch of stems, they tumble down and I hand prune them off.

Foliage on both is always very clean and a deep green. Foliage lasts well into late fall-early winter and when the leaves eventually fall they leave a nice structure of creamy colored branches on the wall. They are late to start up in the spring, but fill in quickly once they do and give good coverage. If they can holdfast to the wood fence that would be a really nice advantage in using them there.

I also have a Hall's Honeysuckle. This one I let go up a large trellis and flop back down in a waterfall manner. It cannnot climb the wall by itself I also have to watch this one carefully and catch all the long stems on the sides (wants to grow wider than a trellis) that get missed (not tucked into the trellis) and trail around on the ground. Whenever I find a bunch of leaves on the ground 10-20 feet away that look like honeysuckle leaves, I have to lift the stem up and trace it all the way back to the mother plant and snip it off. I've never had any trouble with the vine rooting where it lays, but I am pretty vigilant.

Foliage on Hall's is shinier and brighter than on the trumpets. Mine always stays clean, no mildew problems, but I sometimes get dead inside leaves from the flopover growth pattern it grows in. Flowers smell wonderful, even in a cold zone 5. I do not get a ton of them because of the cutting back that I do on this one. (I'm not sure if this one grows flowers on old stems only or not, but it seems to bloom at least more heavily on old stems.) I would definitely put this one somewhere where I walked around or near it.

Sorry, but I have not grown the Hydrangea vine.

Sun/shade/dry shouldn't bother the others much. Of my trumpets one grows on the east side of the house and the other on the west. The hall's grows on the east side towards the south near my gate to the back yard. I have heavy clay moisture retentive soil. Plants were pocket planted only, in lightly amended soil and generally receive no supplemental water, only what they can get under the eaves. I'd probably need a bulldozer and a big truck to pull them out of the clay now.

Th you for terrifically helpful info.Backs up my experiences with these plants as well ,though i HAVE had problems w/ loniceras not being happy in a certain place- full sun on 2 garden-entry obelisks - so i replaced them w the campsis- thus the obelisk-eating campsis that I will now be moving to a stockade fence!! (I'm going to try the following: leave the more vigorous (HA!) campsis on its obelisk, make a heavy metal arch connecting the 2 5' obelisks, "train"(!!) the remaining campsis over the arch to the other obelisk. if that one campsis proceeds to devour BOTH obelisks next yr, t'will be gonzo by '09.

the worst thing about the wild abandon of the campsis is that if you whack it back, you lose all the flowers because they grow at the tips of those wild branches.

th again,
mindy

Yeah, I grow my campsis primarly for the dark green foliage. I consider the blooms to be bonuses. I should have mentioned the bloom issue in my first post. By cutting back so much I lose a lot of my blooms. The one on the east side (also towards the north end with little sun) seldom blooms. The other on the west side does okay, but nothing spectacular.

In my case it doesn't matter much. For me the Campsis vines are a fairly neat solution - attractive dark foliage which stays upright & is easy to trim, with a long attractive season (I'm rather fond of the creamy wood effect in winter as well). I wanted to create a hedge effect or backdrop behind the lower garden perennials in a long narrow space, without taking up the space for yews or arborvitae.

The vine works well. It was something I read about in a chapter in a Ken Druse book on shade gardening, although I'm actually causing the reduced blooming mostly by cutting back rather than shading out the blooms. I use the campsis, three clematis, and a variegated porcelain berry vine on a long very blank orangish brick wall. The clems provide some summer season color, the blue-green berries look nice in late summer-early fall.

The campsis foliage can be climbed on by the clems and all the green vining against the wall looks nice and widens the color range I can use (orange brick is sometimes hard to work with) in the beds. If the campsis doesn't bloom enough for you, you can always add a clem every once in awhile along the fence line. Clems love to climb other vines. Just don't clash the colors too much with the orange/red trumpets. Almost any of the deep purples or violets would work well, and there are many lovely whites. Red clems won't work, as they are always on the purple side of red.

you contiue with the excellent advice! the issues you raise show me that we definitely think along many of the same lines. And your rationale for choosing the campsis is like mine-wanting to green up a fence behind shallow beds- though in this case- a shady dry stretch where lonicera and ampelopsis have not been happy. And exc observation about clematis with the green backdrop. If my one- campsis-over-2-obelisks idea works out, i'll grow a clematis up the campsis-covered but non campsis-planted obelisk.

have you tried actinidia on your wall? the bicolor effect is neat and clean, w/some pink tinges. i also LOVE and grow variegated ampelopsis and varieg va creeper but i can't get them to be robust (though i have never fertilized them, duh.)

i also got, just this year, a yellow boston ivy...

best,
mindy