Bye Bye American Pie : This Guy Spent 4 Years Growing A Church From Trees

The enchantingly beautiful live-tree church in New Zealander Brian Cox’s backyard is already impressive enough, but it’s even more amazing when you learn that it took him only 4 years to create!

Cox carefully selected from a wide variety of trees for his beautiful church. Some have stone-colored trunks, while, others, with sparse foliage, ensure that his church will always be illuminated by sunlight. His secret is that he owns a gardening company called Treelocations, which replants whole, live trees using enormous mechanized spades. This allowed him to plant live trees in any way he wanted, completing this church (and the iron frame supporting it) in only 4 years.

Cox was inspired by the years he spent traveling abroad and observing churches around the world; “I walked out my back door one day and thought, ‘That space needs a church’ – and so it began. I cleared the area in April 2011 and made the iron frame, drawing on all the research I had done over the years of studying churches,” he told stuff.co.nz.