Any of the Hydrangea paniculata cultivars will do well in full sun. They require several hours of direct sunlight to bloom well. I also grow Oakleafs and some macrophyllas in full afternoon sun and I presume they would tolerate an all day exposure. The yellow leaf macrophylla cultivars, such as 'Lemon Zest', 'Lemon Daddy' , 'Sun Goddess'and others, need some direct sun exposure to develop their best color. Any Hydrangea planted in full sun exposure will require close attention to watering needs for the first couple of years, until the roots become well established.

I would not select a bigleaf hydrangea for a full sun location in your zone. These are really woodland plants and are not well-suited to that strong of sunlight. Even in my very northern zone 8 climate, which gets neither strong direct sunlight in summer or high heat, big leaf hydrangeas suffer in full sun - daily wilting, bleached out foliage and faded flower color. The paniculatas would fair much better in this location but still require a lot of attention to watering.

I've been growing Camelia sinensis, 'tea plant' in Atlanta(7b) for 4 years. They've made it through the winter unprotected. They are slow growing but would make a beautiful hedge. I've seen rabbiteye blueberries trimmed as a loose hedge. They are mostly deciduous, but somewhat hold on to their leaves, slow growing, and the birds will always win. I don't know anything about 'goumi berries', but they are related to the eleagnus species that is grown along the interstate. I don't know if they are invasive or not. I would check. maybe hazlenut, it is deciduous but it might make a cool tree hedge. Or a Belgian fence, a type of apple tree espalier. Since I'm 'off the tracks' you could also do a low double wire muscadine fence - deciduous, but a green wall all summer. Apples are hard, but muscadine and blueberries are bomb proof. Needless to say, I wish I had a long length of sun.

NH Babs my little drawing i did is by no means to scale. I doubt the walk way on the left will probably be no wider than 36-40”. I originally told the landscape architect to put the walk way against the house leaving larger planting beds against the black aluminium fencing we will have and he balked at that idea. He said it would look much nicer to have a bed on either side. He said the exposed concreted crawl space foundation will look nicer with shrubs in front of it. When he explained it that way it made sense to us. He proposed doing three free standing trellis features with a climbing flower vine on each. and tidy boxwood hedge in between those. There are only three small windows on that side of the house on the bottom level. so it’s mainly just a large expanse of siding. This was all verbal of course. We haven’t gotten any plans back from him yet. This is why I’m here though. Trying to get as much feed back and info as we can so we can be prepared and educated on plants and ideas as to work on this until we get it right. Our last home the architect drew it up based on what we said. We signed off and in the end we were never quite happy with what we got in comparison to the vision in my head. However i can’t blame them as we were not educated enough and prepared enough to make different suggestions or push back when we didn’t agree with them. We had a large lot with a whole lot of plants that made no sense. A huge amount of stamped concrete and we only used a small portion of it etc. We spent a ridiculous amount of money on something that we could never really bring to fruition. Hoping with a lot of research to avoid that this time around!