Rene' Joseph based the design on the purpose of the mural--to brighten and open up the space next to the community garden.  Because the mural can be viewed from the street with its car, sidewalk, and bus traffic, the artist's design takes into account the movement of spectators rather then just a fixed gaze from a single standpoint, as is the case when smaller scale easel paintings are contemplated. 

Because the wall is right up against the gardeners real plots, the artist didn't want too much foreground in the mural.  Also, the trees in the lot in front of the gardens act as living foreground.  As a foil, they move with the viewer's standpoint.  Since a foreground wasn't needed at the base of the picture, the artist innovated the constellation figure.  Though placed up at the top of the mural in the background, it acts as a traditional foreground figure through the use of  foreshortening.  The figure commands the sky by coming forward 3-dimensionally.  

The mural visually opens up the garden space because the artist optically created an illusion of space in the underlying drawing.  The artist divided the picture plane into thirds both across and into the space of the picture.  This pictorial structure creates a hidden box within a box so that the painted landscape goes out to a imaginary vanishing point.  The top third imagery of the picture is sky--which also works to open up the flat space of the wall.  All the elements of the design converge from the corners into the center of the picture.  To keep the composition "off" and unpredictable, the artist was careful not to make a center point.  With compositional lines angled in from the four corners towards the center of the picture, the opening perspective is empathized. 

Horizontally, one side is the night side, with a mythological theme: the other end is the summer, or day side with people in the shade of a Victorian porch.  Mythological images alongside more conventionally realistic figures symbolize the play of reality and imagination.

The middle, which takes up a larger area of space, is the place of the main theme of the garden mural.  Here, the painted garden plots echo the garden area.  The plots of the garden are represented as a quilted cloth with folds being held up by birds and a flying figure.  Using superimposed imagery, the scene depicts these figures dropping the cloth of the garden from the sky over the cityscape.

Painted in bright colors, the highly readable abstract mural depicts all aspects of gardening, including the necessities of sunlight and darkness, water and heat, as well as the inspiration and pleasure gained by the gardener at the site of growing plants.

The meaning of the imagery is clear.  The garden is created both by magical powers and human toil and intervention.