Little is known of John Hill’s life before the 1730s. At various times he was an apothecary, an actor, and a gossip columnist. Through his study of botany he became acquainted with various members of London’s scientific community, including Sir Hans Sloane, and was employed by the Duke of Richmond and Lord Petre to arrange their gardens and collections of dried plants. John Stuart, Earl of Bute, later became his patron, and in 1761 obtained for him the post of gardener in the newly established botanical gardens at Kensington Palace (previously the residence of George II).

In 1757, he published this book Eden, or a compleat body of gardening as a companion to Thomas Hales’s similarly titled A Compleat body of Husbandry, an important mid-eighteenth-century farming manual. The work was copiously illustrated and published in weekly parts between August 1756 and October 1757. It offered advice to subscribers what to do with their garden over the following week.