Hydrangea petiolaris? Friends of our have this climbing the trunk of a large pine tree.

there are some darker pink forms of C montana that you could keep pruned to space.
Ive seem honeysuckle in a pinky form too.

Remember the centre of old Conifers get very dry in a hot summer and are a fire hazard. Costly to remove but safer.

Thanks for the replies :)

I actually have a climbing hydrangea that i'm digging up as it's not doing well in it's current location so I could use that. Unfortunately it's a white one but it would look better than a bare trunk.

Yes another Montana might be nice, it certainly grows well there. I would prefer something that flowers through the summer though.

You must have hotter summers in Northamptonshire than we get in Cheshire Dianebully! I'd love to get it taken out but very limited access prohibits sadly. It also has several BT lines running through it and I don't fancy being responsible for taking one of those down!

If you can show it's affecting the BT lines they will take it down for you - they've just removed several big ones from the bank outside our patch.

Don't BT charge for this down south Steragram? An old neighbour of mine was going to be hit with a MASSIVE bill when one of their trees affected out lines. Luckily BT gave them 3 days notice to deal with it before they took action.

Check again. BT should pay because of the continued
fire hazard. Some kids in the school playground behind
my flat set fire to mine. Terrible. The fire service was
25 minutes getting 2 miles up here.

I don't think so. They may in England, but I don't think they charged my neighbour ,but they didn't take the tree down, just removed the offending branches. It would be well worth contacting BT to find out though..nothing to lose.

No way should you take it down yourselves though. Another neighbour tried that last year and brought down a power line across our drive. Its very quiet here but when we do drama we do it well!

I know they removed a tree from a friends garden that was in the way of some lines they wanted to put in, but when I made enquiries on the Garden Law website general consensus was that they would charge to remove it or would just remove the offending branches :(

We've had a couple of tree surgeons round to look at the job but they advised leaving it due to the lines and access problem. It is rather unsightly but does offer us a lot of privacy and screens a garage that is right over the garden wall so does have it's advantages.