Microcosms

Sacred Plants of the Americas

Jill Pflugheber, Steven F. White

Stunningly beautiful confocal microscope images of 50 sacred plants of the Americas are accompanied by their scientific, historical, and cultural narratives.

290 x 265

264 pages

Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-906506-79-7

£40.00

Subjects: Natural History, Photography

Publication: September 2025

To pay homage to sacred plants revered by Indigenous groups throughout the Americas is a way of honouring the entire world in a time of environmental emergency.

The visual contents of this book magnify life in ways that may alter how humans perceive other living entities from our shared and threatened biosphere.

Some of these plants contain the most potent psychoactive agents on the planet and serve as intermediaries that have enabled Native communities to communicate with their ancestors, wage war on the enemies of their land and their traditions, conceptualise entire cosmogonies, and maintain a nearly impossible ecological equilibrium.

Each exquisite detail in these vital portraits, created with a confocal microscope, is not only a way into previously unseen vegetal realms, but also a potential way out of our collective crisis.

Jill Pflugheber, Steven F. White

Jill Pflugheber is a Microscopy Specialist who taught Scanning Electron Microscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy, Research Methods in Fluorescence and Confocal Microscopy, and Research Methods in Cell Biology at her alma mater St. Lawrence University for almost twenty years. She has also worked in biomedical research at Harvard University, University of Kentucky, and the University of Texas SW Medical Center. In the summer of 2023, she relocated to Kentucky, and resumed her research career in a lab at the University of Kentucky that studies immune responses to RNA virus infection and vaccination.

Steven F. White was educated at Williams College and received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. White is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and two Fulbright grants for a literary project in Chile and curricular development as a Senior Specialist in Nicaragua. When he was 22, his interest in sacred plants motivated him to visit a Cofan community in the Ecuadorean Amazon in 1977. During a transformative sabbatical year in 1993-94, he studied South American shamanism and actively participated in the Santo Daime Church on the island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil.

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“Overall, the fruitfulness of the transdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists that underlies the Microcosms project is made evident by the captivating nature of each image and the implications of the knowledge and discoveries yet to be made from the study of these plants. By purposely blurring the traditional boundaries between art and science, a diverse audience is skillfully made to contemplate critical issues of our time concerning the pressing need to prevent biodiversity loss in all its forms and ensure the preservation of indigenous knowledge.”
Dr. Stephen J. Haggarty, Harvard Medical School and Director, Chemical Neurobiology Laboratory, Mass General Center for Genomic Medicine

“Microcosms, by positioning itself at the crossroads of botany, technology and art, furnishes us with a special toolkit to our shared objective: understanding our place within Nature, not as contemplative masters but rather as fellow travellers.” 
Dr. Paco Calvo, author of Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence (Norton, 2023).

“Just when you think that the only way to see these sacred plants in an entirely new way is to ingest them, along comes Microcosms which is guaranteed to offer a perspective you have never seen before in a unique marriage of biology, technology, art and entheogen!”
Dr. Mark J. Plotkin, Ethnobotanist, Co-Founder and President, The Amazon Conservation Team. Host of Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast.

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