Thanks all for your responses...good point about the tieing rather than weaving...my situation is that I'm a teacher and this is a summer home. It is about 150 feet of 4ft or 6 ft tall chain link fence...not sure yet...i havent put it in yet. This is all a summer project. It is on about a 30 degree slope. I'm not sure about the soil..people say it is very much clay up there but actually not sure about my specific plot of land. I actually live in Florida and go up to Virginia for 2 weeks over Christmas, 8-10 weeks in summer and 1 week in late march/early april. I was thinking roses would be low maintnance. I was trying to get something that would flower over spring and Summer as thats the time i would be there most. I understand the Virginia creeper would be very beautiful in the fall as it changes colors but does it flower over the summer? and does it keep its leaves durring the cold Virginia winter? Do the roses need to be cut back every year or leave them alone on the fence and let them come back every year? also when i was up there last i saw a vine, i think it was a virginia creeper climbing my sycamore tree....will it kill that tree if i dont get rid of it?

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 : (

I went the opposite way. When Deb first got some clematis (4), I planted them in pairs a foot apart. I didn't care how close they were. The things didn't take up as much room and were away from roses. After all... they were just weeds Deb wanted to have. It wasn't like they were important :) I didn't care if they competed for sun and root space. Somewhere along the line.... I became fond of the things. Watched Dr Ruppel strangle Ramona and Jackmanii almost did the same to Ernest Markham. I was amazed at the size of the rootballs when I dug up established clematis. The roots on our 12 year old Dr Ruppel are 2 feet in diameter. Don't know how deep they go on him. I had to move the 12 year old Jackmanii and it was 18 inches in diameter and 2 feet deep. I began to respect them as good plants in their own right. I was also glad I had planted clematis at least 2 feet from the roses. Never expected weed roots to get so large. Hope you realize I am a very strange gardener. I get claustrophobic seeing clematis wrapped around rose canes. I try to keep the clematis on the fence or trellis. I want the plants to have room for their roots to grow. It makes for a strange garden too :) It is a jungle but I like to consider it an organized jungle, lol. Not saying my way is right or that planting clematis a foot apart is wrong. Just trying to explain why I no longer plant them so close together. Have to admit, life was much simpler when I just planted the rascals together out of the way. How can a rose guy justify spending time taking care of weeds.... or, heaven forbid, using precious garden space for a nonrose??? *sigh* OK, I'll shutup :) On preview I realized we do have some new clematis I leave close to other plants. We find volunteer seedlings and leave them where they come up for a few years. A couple of them are huge now and I'm gonna have to transplant them soon. How did a rose guy get so tangled up in weeds??

Don't know if you are still monitoring this thread, but just in case I will kick in my experience. We live in Gilbert, Az.(near Phnx), and have over 200' of 5' chainlink on our west side next to a canal. We have tried pink bower vine, potato vine, Lady Bank's Rose, snail vine, and finally, passion vine. The bower vine and potato vine were a disaster, the Bank's rose is barely holding its own (but it IS under a big cottonwood tree), the snail vine is doing ok, but not great. The passion vine seems to be the one that will take. After 3 years it has grown 20' in each direction, and has lush dark green foliage with copious beautiful large purple blooms. They smell a little funny, but are attractive nonetheless. It froze back one year, but returned with renewed vigor in the spring. Try it, you will like it! Today I was clearing the weeds and dead grass from under it and noticed that the ever-present large orange butterflies were laying 1 egg at a time on the leaves. We have never seen a caterpillar, but there must be some relationship going on. Good luck!