Hundertwasser's comment on the work

Here an ecological burial method is already anticipated. In it, the dead are buried in harmony with nature and creation, integrated into an ecological whole, returned to a higher order. In this way there would be no more cemeteries, but just a respected, sanctified nature which goes on reproducing, with trees growing out of people, where there are no dead, only life. This I called the "Garden of the Happy Dead". The spiral is a symbol of the cycle of death and rebirth, of eternal life.(from: Hundertwasser Architecture, Cologne, 1997, p. 17)The painting and its name tell the whole story. The garden of paradise with a fence, the gate, the life-and-death spiral. It is an anticipation of the ecological form of burial: a tree planted on the grave so that it can continue life. In this way one has not died, but lives on in the tree: in one's own physical self one gives nature back something of what we have taken away from her. Hence the good conscience and the happy dead. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 252)