is your metal fence solid or made up of metal lattice or vertical bars? clematis climb by twining their leaves around supports, so if your fence is solid, you will have to attach some support wire for them to climb. i have a similar situation to yours, a long fence (60ft) which i'm filling with clematis. i'm also in NJ. i'm now onto year 3. i space my clematis a bit tight - one every 2 feet or so. in addition to all the clematis research you might do, i wanted to share one learning i've gathered from all this. make sure to alternate the colors, red, blue, pink, white on your fence for impact. that way they will pop from a distance. katie's suggestions sound great although i have a lot of type 2s on my fence too since they bloom earlier than type 3s to extend the show. their blooms also tend to show up better from a distance. long flowering type 2s i have include: ramona (1 month+ in late may/early june + repeat sporadic blooms in summer) and multiblue (blooms early may with very interesting puffball centers that stay for several weeks after petals fall off). niobe is also a very beautiful short red, but haven't had it long enough to see it's mature form. either way, be sure to keep your type 3s (hard prune) away from the type 2s (light prune) or you will have a mess on your hands.

Leave a clear space just inside the fence and use vines on the fence to provide privacy in that area immediately inside the gate. I looked for pictures of out gate that opens our gate that opens outward (the north alley gate) to try to show what we did. The 'man door' at the back of the garage opens into the alley just inside the gate too so the clear space provides access to that door as well as space for moving the lawn mower or snow blower etc. in/out of the garage through that door. Some pictures: In early May - you can see the basic space a bit better before everything leafs out...: In July - from outside the gate - with clematises in bloom: Looking from the road when the clematises are in bloom: Maybe something like that could work for you...?

I'll try to find out more about the fence...at minimum it needs a 3' setback and no higher than 3'. Even a fence that is inside of the trees would create a small private space, I guess I need to consider whether or not that would be worth the cost. I need to find out if there is any possibility of a 5' fence. If I cannot install anything that would create real privacy, then I don't want to bother with a fence at all and would rather just get rid of the lawn and underplant the trees with shrubs/perennials/groundcovers to make the front and this side cohesive (but making this be clearly a side), widen the driveway, and put up a sign that tells people to go the front door around the corner I guess. Now that the plants have gotten overgrown, the door isn't visible to the street except at night when the light is on. Here are some photos of the front. Yes things have gotten overgrown, the style of this landscape when we moved in was that everything was a tight rectangle or ball. In the process of letting things get a more natural shape, it became very clear they are too close to the house so most or all of the foundation shrubs probably need to be taken out or hedged (dislike the hedging option). Also the lawn makes our water bill high and it's mainly there for the neighborhood dogs :-P So I want to take it all out. The house is a 60s suburban ranch style. The front of the house faces south, so again the shade is needed. BUT I dislike that the house is hidden AND at the same time it doesn't feel at all private. Some of the things I'm thinking of taking out: Both purple leaf plums are at the end of their lifespan according to the arborist, and the one I've "x"ed out has Ganoderma fungus at the base. She said the "x" tree could probably live a few more years so we've had it treated and will be cleaned up soon along with the other...buying some time while I dither over the landscape re-do. One idea I had was to flank the front entrance yard on either side of the house with 'Natchez' crape myrtles. We love them and they do very well here, and the arborist said we have enough space. I'd like to keep their canopy open and high so that we get shade without blocking the front of house! The "?" is a planting of two Feijoa sellowiana; they are too close to the front door walkway, and the walk needs redoing and to be less curved to the left. Right now they are dropping fruit daily. Currently undecided whether to remove the Feijoa, or cut them down and allow to regrow in a prettier vase form, or leave them alone and just raise the canopy and accept all the strange branching. Behind the Feijoa are four meyer lemons that have been hedged for years. The bases are 2.5' at most from the house. I'm thinking about taking out 3 and allowing one of the bushes on the left to grow into a small ornamental tree...but again it might just be too close to the house and needs to go. I am in the process of trying to hire a designer, but I want to be sure my expectations are realistic and I want to be able to be more clear/reasonable when I tell them what I'm looking for in a design. Barriers to a productive design, on my end, are that I'm indecisive and I cannot find an online example of a front corner like ours that is landscaped in a way I like, and I'm struggling with trusting someone to create something I'd like. Examples they've shown are either huge yards with more normal layouts, or corners that the front side connected to the back. One last goal I had for a re-design: all around the footprint of the house, about 4' from the foundation, are approximately 20 "moss rocks" that are about 2-3' in diameter. I'd really like to incorporate them as more a feature somehow. I wanted a designer to figure that out though, once they are moved we really don't want to move them again. Here's one example of a yard I quite like:

So the gate will be way back alongside the house, probably extending from the front corner of the house, right? That would allow people to pull into the driveway, without the dog greeting them with a hug. The dog will have the run of the backyard, not the front? So you won’t be putting a fence atop the stone wall (that wall is gorgeous, by the way). Just a word about the gate, especially if the dog is a jumper. One evening as I drove down my parents’ lane, I saw a deer stuck atop an iron fence. I worried that it was impaled on it and called emergency. While I tried to discern the street number without further freaking out the deer, the dispatcher told me that happened more often than people knew, with deer getting either wedged between the pikes or impaled on them. This deer, fortunately, had only gotten wedged and eventually worked its way free and on over the fence.