There's a piece of Northfield on the cover of the newest issue of Midwest Home & Garden, but you won't recognize it.

Stepping into the long, majestic garden behind St. Olaf English Professor Jonathan Hill's somewhat ordinary looking house, you might think you had stumbled onto a masterpiece theater set. The rich green symmetry of arbor vitae hedges and columns leads your eyes back and back. Moving past a great weeping willow, through a trellis covered with grape and kiwi vines, over flowerbeds and across luxuriant green lawns. In Spring you would half expect to see women in white flowered dresses and dapper young men in 19th century attire playing croquet or picnicking on scones and tea under the shade of the young oak and slender linden trees.

It's a piece of England right here in Northfield. Dr. Hill and his wife, Barbara, emigrated to the U.S. from England, and settled in Northfield in 1971. Their home, located near the St. Olaf campus, rested on the remains of a large corn and soy field. After a short adjustment period, the Hills waded imperially into the wild overgrowth to begin cultivating a garden reminiscent of the ones they left across the Atlantic.

Thirty years later, the Hills have managed to coax a spectacular two-acre English-style garden from Northfield's humble Midwestern landscape. The Hills explained their creation: "Coming from England, most of our reflexes are entirely un-Midwestern. The Midwestern reflex is that if you have a front yard, you leave it open and invite everyone into it. The British reflex," Hill pauses and smirks wryly, "is to fence it and keep everyone out. That's what we've done."

Hill contrasts the tradition of the English garden against the geometric, overtly manicured style of the French garden, saying that the typical English style "is to keep the planning, the design and the views as natural as possible." He cheerily admits, that the planning and maintenance involved in an English garden "seems like the height of artificiality compared to the Upper-Midwestern garden."

The Hills say that they spend a great deal of time making their garden look as if it hasn't been worked on. But for them it is recreation, not work. The payoff of all of these loving hours spent in the garden is plain to see.

Hill shows his guests through all the sections of his garden with a tranquil pride and demonstrates an intimacy with every eccentric detail of the garden. Below a bench sit slabs of dressed limestone from the lintels above the windows of the old Ytterboe Hall, still bearing the marks of student carvings. He reveals a secret passage he had cut through a grove of evergreens for his nephews and nieces, and then points out a bright red cardinal perched on a treetop as if it had claimed the garden for its own.

"Our garden is the supreme tranquilizer for us," said Hill, "the great place of peace. We walk around the garden two or three times a day - it comes at the price of hours of grass clipping."

Surveying his garden, Hill remarked in a deadpan tone that "one could regard it as a striking example of immigrant failure to adapt to their local conditions." He laughs and then continues, "Like so many immigrants, we came over with all our reflexes intact, and we live as if we've never actually left our own country."