I have privet along the fence that I have been encouraging to grow about 10' tall so that I have even more privacy that my fence provides. It grows fast, is almost impossible to kill, and easy to make whatever shape you want. I also have jasmine, which smells nice, but only blooms for a short time and honeysuckle which blooms a bit later, then pots of various flowering plants around the area- things that bloom in the summer, but are year-round green, like lavender. I have to go for drought tolerant hardy plants, since I did not inherit the family's green thumb, and it gets pretty HOT here in the summer. There are some daisies and roses, too, and allysum as a ground cover/filler, which smells nice and is hard to kill, too.
If you do bamboo, you might want it in pots, or somehow contained underground. It will take over, and come up everywhere.
