A farmer has finally reaped what he sowed after a labour of love planted 20 years ago revealed this heavenly message in a field of trees.
Peter Gunner carefully planted dozens of willow trees to spell out his favourite Bible passage, John 14:6: “Jesus said to him: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’.”
He has spent the last two decades carefully pruning the trees into shape – and the words can now been seen clearly from the air.
Committed Christian Mr Gunner, 62, created the message in his Sussex field so that visitors could ‘lose themselves’ in a metaphor for life.
He said: “You walk around in it but you don’t really know what your life is going to look like from above.”
The Christian mapped out the words on a computer before taking to the field at his home, Burchetts Farm, near Chiddingly, with a tape measure and some string.
But his first attempt in the 1990s backfired and he ended up with a thorny mess of thistles, so he was forced to pull it all up and start again.
Peter regularly prunes his creation, but only saw it from above for the first time recently, when a police officer neighbour gave him an aerial picture taken from a helicopter.
Unfortunately, the aerial images highlighted slight mistakes in the amazing creation – the top of the J is slightly wonky and the ‘a’ in ‘am’ is askew – which he hopes to fix one day.
He said: “It’s a sort of maze but I haven’t very often got lost in it because it’s quite open.”
Religious Peter and his wife Faith also had the word ‘rejoice’ placed on the roof of their barn in different coloured-tiles.
