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At the bounds of Lake Raleigh, deciduous and evergreen trees mingle, shading a carpet of wildflowers that changes colors with each season: Wild ginger’s mottled leaves serve as a backdrop for fall’s tiny purple and white orchids. Jack-in-the-pulpits sing the sermons of small green tree frogs in the spring. And trillium, butterfly weed, gypsyweed, phlox, cardinal flowers, beard tongue, and bluets appear like constellations against an early summer floor.

Kneel beneath the canopy to peek between the petals. Come face-to-face with the keeper of this living patchwork: the winnow ant. Wherever we live in North Carolina, from the mountains to the coast, from urban cities to rural farms, our backyard carpet looks like its own place.

Aphaenogaster carolinensis or, more commonly, the winnow ant. photograph by Alex Wild Photography

But in every landscape, winnow ants, hard at work, help our plants thrive. These rufous-colored insects with long legs and slender waists carry our forests in their powerful jaws.

“North Carolinians are some of the luckiest people in the world,” says naturalist and doctor of entomology Geoff Balme. “We get all these unbelievable wildflowers wherever we look. They’re nice for us to see, but taken together, they’re essential for forest health.” A healthy forest needs a healthy understory, a world which grows closer to tree roots than treetops. Unlike the wooden rigidity of our full-grown trees, the understory holds a nursery of tender saplings. It holds the supple ferns and rustling shrubs. It holds soft-stemmed plants like herbs and wildflowers.

“What most people don’t know,” Balme says, “is that the forest needs wildflowers and herbs, but those wildflowers and herbs need ants.”

When the plants produce seeds, they wrap their children in a secret: a fatty, protein-filled cloak that smells like heaven to only one creature — ants. Unable to resist the scent, the ants pick up the cloaked seeds and carry them home.

There are no guarantees for plant parents, whose children encounter a host of dangers on the forest floor. If seeds are left on the ground too long, a seedeater might come crush them. If seedlings grow too close to one another, they may steal too much food from each other and wither together. Plants’ children, like our own children, can get diseases or fail to land in a place of plenty.

Winnow ants care for the seeds. They carry them away from the parent plant, protecting them from the creatures that might eat them. Winnow ants may also treat seeds with antibiotics to clear them of fungus. These insects eat only the cloak and plant the seed in their trash pile, rich with the nutrients of ant waste and decaying small creatures. Winnow ants give the seeds space and food.

“Today, we have other ants moving in, like Asian needle ants. These ants don’t disperse seeds, and they are pushing out our winnow ants,” Balme says. “What will our natural areas look like without our winnow ants? Time will tell.”

The wildflowers and herbaceous plants across our forests carry names from another time — fringed bleeding heart, snowdrop, bloodroot — names as unusual as the ants that carry our forests. Because North Carolina has mountain streams and waterfalls, sandy pine stands and rich, dark hardwood groves, our state grows abundant with some of the most beautiful wildflowers and herbs on Earth. Look down, see the flowers. Look closer, find the rusty ballerina — about the size of a grain of rice — who planted our glorious patchwork tending to her vast garden.

If our seed-dispersing ants were removed from the forest, the number of wildflowers and herbs would drop by around 40 percent as the understory would struggle to endure. In places where winnow ants thrive, so, too, does the forest. Here, roots and leaves hold water close to the floor, quenching the trees above and cleaning nearby streams and rivers. The world underfoot determines the world above. This massive, splendid realm of ours must first be carried in the mouths of ants.