Tristan Roberts | This spot on Earth: The peony doesn’t bloom without all of us

Do peonies suffer imposter syndrome? I started wondering about this when Sallie told me last summer that peony buds can’t open without help from black ants.

What’s that?

“They tickle the buds,” she told me, not even looking up from weeding crabgrass.

As unlikely as it sounded, I believed her right away. One, it fit my observations. As soon as the peony buds start to form in May, I start yollering, “The peonies are going to open soon!”

I end up being weeks ahead of schedule. What’s taking them so long? When they finally open, I greet them with joy. “Hello peonies!” I say. “You are so beautiful! What took you so long?”

Problem solved — they were waiting on ant tickling. I’ve seen plenty of black ants crawling over unopened peony buds, and also I’ve noticed nibbles here and there. Why not?

Two, Sallie and I trust each other on things like where to stop for peaches, how to sniff out the perfect cantaloupe, and what to feed her nauseous pregnant daughter (grits). Chalk up the peonies as more Sallie wisdom.

But then I started to worry about the peony psyche. Or maybe I was projecting my neuroses onto the peony, worrying about it, then patting myself on the back for my extraordinary empathy.

Raise your hand if you don’t feel imposter syndrome a lot of the time? It’s that feeling that you’re out of your league, you don’t belong, and sooner or later everyone else is going to notice that you’re out of place. You’ll be cut from the team and sent home as a failure.

Though this kind of attitude keeps you humble, it makes you immune to receiving compliments.

“Beautiful?” a peony suffering imposter syndrome might say. “I feel like a fraud next to those purple irises. They don’t need ants to open.”

I jotted this peony thing down last summer — I thought it would make a great column. That’s when I fact-checked Sallie and found she had succumbed to a myth. Botanists raised peonies in an ant-free environment and the flowers opened right on time. You might see ants on peonies but it means nothing.

I felt alone again with my imposter syndrome. “Peonies blossom without any help,” I told myself, scolding myself for feeling different.

I put the column away, and forgot about peonies.

January arrived. The Legislature started back up. I went to Montpelier. I introduced bills, none of which went anywhere. I co-sponsored legislation, none of which seemed to go anywhere. I sat in committee hearings for eight hours a day, which did go somewhere — slowly.

After three or four weeks, I had to admit I felt depressed, and I wondered why.

Was it the long hours for short pay? Was it being away from home? Was it hour after hour of testimony telling us how things aren’t working? Was it bad sleep? Whereas I had been feeling excited to get out of bed and get to work, I started to wake up even earlier but with more of an anxious pressure to do something.

I used to think I might be good at this job. Instead, I looked around at my colleagues and saw peonies, and myself an ant. For all the good I felt that I was doing, I wondered why I was in Montpelier. Going home, even in failure, felt like it could be a relief.

One day, too many days into this, I found myself thinking about thrips.

“What’s a thrip?” my son asked when I mentioned it. “Do you get them at the thrip store?”

“Let’s go thripping!” I laughed.

Yes — it’s punning first, entomology second in our family. How do you get to know an insect that is thin as a hair and less than one millimeter long, and that lives in over 7,000 forms worldwide?

I had to read up on them to know that thrips are one of the most feared insects to tomato farmers. Thrips carry around an RNA virus that causes spotted wilt, one of the most costly crop diseases worldwide, and others.

But fear thrips, we should not. Scientists believe that thrips may have been the first insect pollinator. Though thousands of others have evolved since, thrips remain the sole pollinator for some, including chili peppers. A thrip comes to dine on their nectar, then affix a tiny pollen grain to its back. Then flies between blossoms with a unique type of aviation, the clap and fling.

The best I can do to describe this maneuver, in which the thrip’s inventive rotational wings create vortices of lift that build on each other, is to say that it looks every bit as inventive and elegant as if Wayne Gretzky himself took all his talent with a hockey stick and became a winged insect in his next lifetime.

Thrips in space? Charles Darwin grew frustrated in studying thrips because he couldn’t find a screen small enough to keep them out. They’ve been known to squeeze inside an LCD screen, and you heard it here first — I predict that a thrip stowaway will cause the first crop failure on Mars.

In the right quantity, thrips are a needed pollinator. But in a greenhouse that lacks natural predators, thrips can explode in population and swarm. Peony buds chewed up by too many thrips become cankered and drop to the ground, unopened.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Sallie. As long as there are thrips in the world — and we need there to be — peony blossoms will need black ants.

As an offering, peonies leave some extra beads of nectar here and there on their developing flower buds. An ant scout finds it and carries a taste back to the nest. The ant and its friends return and make regular trips to eat the nectar.

The famous gangs might as well be called Thrips and Bloods instead for how these rival insects skirmish over the peony turf. Ants encountering thrips might kick them off or spray them with formic acid. But thrips are small and canny and aren’t dislodged so easily.

“Nature is all about checks and balances,” I said to my son, and then wondered if I was talking about peonies or about how if anything was easy to do in the Legislature it would be exploited. If there is any progress to be made, it would need to be in pushing at the difficult edges of our world. Doing so should be hard. Maybe change is best when it is slow and nonviolent — spreading one heart at a time.

German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that evil exists the way a doughnut hole does — as the absence of something. And while evil may gnaw at us like hunger, I believe, with Leibniz, that good has the upper hand.

As Leibniz wrote in 1710, “God is infinite, and the devil is limited; the good may and does go to infinity, while evil has its bounds.”

I sum it up this way — If the peony couldn’t flower without ants and thrips, what makes you think it could flower without — you?

This May, flower beds in front of the State House and around Vermont will be bursting with blossoms, while inside, we’ll be arguing over the budget. We all make this beautiful world together.