Catspa, It sounds like tea noisettes really like it here. I was at the SanJo Heritage Rose Garden last weekend. I checked out a huge Crepuscule on a row end there. This rose was occupying a space roughly the same size as the arbor I'm planning to build, but it looked like someone was fighting with it to keep it in bounds. It had scars on it from where someone had pruned out 3" diameter canes. I don't mind the rose sending canes down over the window during the growing season, but this was more than I am prepared to deal with. Are all tea noisettes as vigorous as this? Are Alister Stella Grey's canes a bit more pliable? Also, do your tea noisettes go deciduous, or do they keep their foliage all winter? Ingrid, I'm sorry to hear that your Reve d'Or got cooked. I'm planning to tear out the sidewalk in the picture and build the arbor roughly 12' high, 10' wide and 4' deep, so the arbor and bed around it will be bigger than the existing bed and won't get reflected heat from the sidewalk. Also, the rose will be planted right on our graywater line, so it will get plenty of water. I realize that it is still a gamble growing a rose in a situation like this, but I'm hard headed, and want to give it a try. I can live with the singed blossoms during the dog days of summer; after all, they look how I feel at that point in the year. I think that wall would be vastly improved by being covered with a rose. I have to try it before I give up and start fighting with a wisteria

You got some great suggestions and your list of Final Candidates is great too. Let us know what you select and how it works out. I've got an orange cross vine ('Tangerine Beauty') on a scalding hot south-facing wall and it's done great for almost four years now (and totally undamaged by this winter's freezes). I couldn't be happier with it. Updates are encouraged. :) Take care, Grant Here is a link that might be useful: Tangerine Beauty crossvine

That's a tough one! If it were my property, I'd try putting in a deciduous tree somewhere in front of the wall that is wide canopied, grows medium-fast and stays reasonably dense in limb structure so that it still provides concealment in winter. And I'd probably do it even if it meant tearing up and rerouting a driveway or taking out previous landscaping. I'm not sure I'd recommend that much work and hassle to anyone else though. The secondary advantage to the tree is that it shades the wall for further understory planting, so that even if the tree gets too tall later on to conceal the wall, it will shade and cool enough to make a nice shade garden, or at least create an environment that's much friendlier to a shade loving evergreen vine. You might be able to find a vine that won't bake on the wall, but it will probably need to be at the back of enough other plantings that the soil stays well-shaded so that its roots don't bake too. Good luck!

Does it get any sun? What is the shade like? (Densely overhanging trees create deep shade, while a white wall with nothing overhanging can be quite bright shade.) Where are you? Not all clematis will grow everywhere.