This small watercolor depicts a gloomy, otherworldly scene. Three Grim Reapers, clothed in black cape, are tending to the plants in a garden

The skeleton on the left is spraying water attentively onto a pot, while the one in the middle, mouth agape, is holding a twig with blue flowers dearly to his/her chest

The Finnish Symbolist artist Hugo Simberg typically did not reveal his compositional intentions. But for this painting he explained: For him, the garden is "the place where the dead end up before going to Heaven"

Simberg's portrayal of Death performing a kind act and his rendering of plants and flowers in almost naive drawings are both intriguing and humorous, perhaps as a result of his personal experience and philosophical evolvement. In 1897 his mother died, and later he suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. After treatment in hospital, he created his most famous work, The Wounded Angel

Simberg was commissioned to decorate the interiors of the new cathedral in Tampere whose construction began in 1902. On the ground floor near the altar, the artist painted a bigger and different version of The Garden of Death, in which he made the lawns greener and the flowers and pots brighter in crimson. The fresco was voted the best work of Finnish art by the readers of Aamulehti in 2005, a daily newspaper published in Tampere, Finland