This paper explores cultural imaginings of the relations between people and plants based on gardening practice, gardening knowledge and in English from an anthropological point of view. These imaginings are a part of holistic understandings of the body, often described as non-Western, and they are compared with Western understandings which are revealed through the metaphor of the body as machine. The analysis shows how gardening practice and knowledge amongst gardeners in the north of England complicate several sets of anthropological understandings such as notions of body as part of the natural cosmos and how connections between people and plants are not necessarily metaphorical but are instead social, embedded in a long history of significance.