I know it may look like it, but ants are not actually eating your peonies.  This time of year, peonies, sometimes called “the king of all flowers” are in full and glorious bloom. And, somewhat alarmingly, this exquisite display is accompanied by swarms of black ants.  According to garden folklore, ants “tickle the buds” to make the flowers blossom.  This is, first of all, nasty and secondly, not true.  Peonies do not require ants to, um, stimulate them into blooming.  But ants do perform a vital service.

Humans are suspicious of ants for good reason.  They invade picnics, creepily crawl on bare skin and sometimes they even bite.  But ants aren’t evil, just hungry (and perpetually in motion).  They will eat anything, especially if it contains sugar—and who can blame them?  It turns out peonies secrete nectar in their early “marshmallow” stage.  (If you lightly pinch the early bud, it is spongy like a marshmallow.)  Ants love the nectar, but do not bite the buds.  In fact, they love the nectar so much that, to protect their food source, they will viciously attack anything that threatens the peonies–like aphids, which are known to damage the flowers.  This mutually beneficial system keeps peonies healthy and beautiful and the ants get to have their marshmallow nectar in between layers of crunchy aphids—a kind of aphid s’more.

You will notice that as soon as your peonies grow out of the marshmallow stage, the ants pack up and leave to find something else to devour.  This spring ants have set up camp in our lawn and nothing we tried could get rid of them.  Then a friend suggested using something called “diatomaceous earth” or DE.  This natural-occurring nontoxic white powder is mostly silica, derived from fossilized remains of diatoms that have accumulated over millions of years.  We tried it and it worked like magic.  Little did I know at the time how monstrous the stuff really is.

A more benevolent alternative to using DE would be to pour gasoline on the anthill, light it on fire and dance around the flames in a loincloth, cursing the ants to everlasting perdition. But I digress.

Diatoms are ocean algae that leave behind a hard silica shell.  Diatomaceous earth kills insects like ants because the abrasive material cuts their exoskeletons—like crawling over broken glass, causing them to slowly dry out and die.  If there was an international criminal court run by ants, I’d be in trouble.

The interaction between ants and peonies is only one example of symbiosis in nature.  Bees and even mosquitoes collect nectar from flowers and help them pollinate.  Clownfish hide from predators by living among the venomous tentacles of the sea anemones who in turn benefit from eating bits of their leftover food and clownfish poop. (Yum!) Another clownfish trick is that they are all born male. When a female in their colony dies, the largest male transforms into a female and takes her place.  It almost seems as if nature already knows what it’s doing and doesn’t need any interference from us.