I'm afraid running bamboo would escape out the drain holes and easity penetrate black plastic. An outward slanting metal barrier going a couple feet down is recommended if you want to TRY to contain it, but there are some nice clumping bamboos you can use. Google 'clumping bamboo'. They will spread a little after a few years but nothing like the running varieties.

That's what I was going to suggest...the clumping variety.
Another idea is to create a trellis the length of the fence and let vines create privacy. Lady banks is another choice though you'd need to keep it trimmed up. The blooms are so beautiful and it stays pretty much evergreen as I recall. My mother had it spilling over a stone wall of her townhouse courtyard and it was lovely but needed maintenance and might eventually require a more substantial support than the wooden fence.

Here is a link that might be useful:

Running bamboo is child's play in our blackland prairies clay compared with the campsis radicans (trumpet vine) or parthenocissus quinquefolia (VA creeper) natives; though imagine it's aggressiveness can vary a lot by soil type and/or region. Here the seeds don't volunteer, so main problem with them is accumulation in the pool skimmer and other filter baskets. The plants will also stay in place indefinitely (3+ decades) with properly installed barriers. If runners (rhizomes) do manage to escape, the fear of dealing with them is often worse than reality (at least in our blp clay). While a few peripheral runners are not tough to deal with, eliminating a well established grove to plant something else could be - suspect this is where a lot of the bad rap comes from.

The bamboo runners we live next to are very shallow, so doubt they would find their way out through the bottom of containers as deep as the ones in your photo. Even most of the roots stay within the top foot of soil, but it's just the shallow runners that need to be contained. The large "mesh" of shallow runners rather than deep roots is what keeps the bamboo vertical in high winds.

We did have bamboo emerge ~25ft from our neighbor's grove when a contractor left 2 inches of topsoil on a concrete pad between our yards. Removed the dirt, pruned the runners, and knocked down the shoots that came up only for a week or two in the spring and they were gone within a couple seasons. The backyard of our relatives' San Antonio home had been taken over by their neighbor's running bamboo at the time they purchased it. Took a lot of work to initially cut it out, but now easily kept in place by just mowing the lawn - the failed or missing rhizome barrier will only become a problem should they ever decide to replace the grass along the property line with a shrub or flower bed.

Here is a link that might be useful: Control and Maintain Running Bamboo

This post was edited by bostedo on Fri, Jun 6, 14 at 13:02

When we bought our house, there was a hedge over 100 feet long of bamboo. Half of it was a clumping kind, and half of it was a running kind. It took over two years to dig all of this out of our yard, and we still fight runners coming from a neighbor's yard that only touches our yard at the corner. Over time, the clumping kind will turn into huge clumps that take up a lot of space. In my soil and climate, the running kind will take on just about anything - at one point the runners had grown through a telephone pole in multiple places, and it was the electric wires that held up the pole instead of the pole holding up the electric wires. The runners were capable of coming up quite a long distance from the main clumps. Both types froze in the few years we had hard freezes here, leaving masses of dead 12 foot tall (or taller) poles. Eventually new growth will cover and hide this mess. I know there are many varieties of bamboo, and how they react to your soil and climate may very well be different than how they grow in mine. I would definitely suggest caution.

This post was edited by plantloverkat on Fri, Jun 6, 14 at 19:01

Brainstormin' here: How about getting an awning company to make a tarp the right size to cover the fence, attach it with grommets top and bottom, put a bird bath, a pot of plants and a chair or two in front of it to break up the space and voila! You've got it covered. There'll be no tobacco smoke nor peering eyes penetrating the cracks between the boards then! Now if you could have a nature mural, such as trees and things, painted on it that would be scrumptious.

This post was edited by roselee on Fri, Jun 6, 14 at 22:58

I would be too scared of the bamboo escaping.

I would just dig up that area along the fence and plant some privacy trees/shrubs. Is this the view looking out your back door? I would just embrace the area and make it beautiful to view.

We had a house that felt too close to the neighbors. We bought some hybrid willows. They came in a box as ten 4 foot sticks. Dh planted them and the next summer they were over ten feet tall. They were probably close to 30 feet tall when we sold the house three years after planting the trees.

Thanks everyone for the input, ideas and advice! I've included a photo of the east side of the yard below (with my temporary barricade) so you can see what we're working with. The earlier photo is just an example of what I had in mind for planters along the fence. I would love for that to be my yard though!

I'm still open to just about anything. I do want privacy but I want it to look somewhat clean and modern, too. The more I think about it, the more certain I am about doing nice planters and the black river rocks. I'm still open to doing other things in the planters though. I was just curious what others in Texas have to say about bamboo.

My temporary setup works for the time being but I'd really like to have something more permanent and formal along the fence. Eventually (as in, much farther down the road) we will landscape the whole back yard so that there's little to no grass.

I do NOT recommend bamboo at all. It will take over both yards and be very expensive and difficult to remove should it escape (which is very likely). I see it is mostly shade, so that complicates your problem. I was going to say attach lattice to the fence then plant vines to grow up the lattice, but not sure if there is such a thing as evergreen shade vines. But you can google it.

I kept running bamboo contained in a raised cement containing wall on one side and a 24" metal barrier on the other side . Well it started out that way. It jumped that and went under my house and came up the other side. We then dug up the Atistic mosaic walk way next to the barrier and put in a 24 inch deep retaining wall and rebuilt the walk way. It came out the drain holes of the raised side of the bed and every year I would jump the fence and pull it out of my neighbors yard. . I would patrol for escaping roots on my side. at 25 years I had a truce going with the running bamboo, but I moved. God knows who's winning now that there has been a change in occupying forces. My money is on the bamboo. I do not think the present owner is as vigilante as I was.

It gives more the illusion of privacy than real privacy if they are staring through the cracks , the neighbors will find the hole in the leaves that lines up with a hole in the bamboo. They do have a rubber flexible barrier that is better than the metal for containing the roots..The Japanese would build stone and mortice lined ditches to contain it. Think long and hard about planting bamboo, especially running bamboo. you are entering into a war with sides and bamboo never sleeps. It is beautiful. Also something about the leaves breed mosquitos. Our yard was awful. I loved the look but I would not plant it again, especially with West Nile Virus around.

go with clumping there are so many kinds, buddha belly, variegated, black. I know of clumps that are 50+ years old and still a nice clump. We saw a very impressive clumping bamboo in a garden last weekend, it was planted in the 70`s and has never spread. In pots they won`t grow as quickly or as big so really a good solution for you. Of course you could just go with grasses, shrubs or annuals. Good luck.
Tally Ho!

So the moral of the story is...don't be bamboozled by bamboo. Or at least not the running variety. It might be easiest just to build a better fence. : ^ )

Another option would be to put another fence inside. It would make your yard shorter. You could put a garden or something back there.

We like our our neighbors. Dh and I sometimes get a laugh. The kids in the house behind us like to climb the fence and talk to me when I'm out in the yard. The lady beside us is a character. She has also been known to climb the fence and talk to us.