They're creepy. They're crawly. Often, they’re cannibals. At any given moment, one may be nearer than you know.

They're swift and silent, some with the ability to swing through the air with the greatest of ease. One of them spooked Miss Muffet right off her tuffet.

Yes, they're spiders, but they’re much more than the Hollywood monsters that scare the bejesus out of us.

Spiders are consummate engineers; their silk is the strongest natural fiber known, stronger than steel drawn out to the same diameter.

Spiders are ingenious architects who build intricate structures, the likes of which humans cannot duplicate.

Some spiders are web-weaving artists whose creations glisten in the morning dew; some are skillful hunters who live in burrows instead of webs.

Without them, we would face an overwhelming number of insect pests that destroy plants, wood and cloth. In this way, spiders are our environmental saviors.

Miss Muffet's unwelcome guest was probably an orb-weaving garden spider, the same kind you are apt to encounter around your yard or patio. If she hadn't run away, Miss M. might have seen something like this:

The lady spider (who is about an inch and a half long and larger than most of her boyfriends) swings gracefully from a silken rope, looking for a place to begin spinning.

She hangs upside down, her four front legs pointing to the ground, their slim black tips helping her to balance. The front of her body, small and silver-gray, is overshadowed by her sizeable rear end, an oval dressed in black and lemon yellow. Her four back legs, dark yellow and black, curve out from her body and point up in a large "U."

She is Argiope aurantia, a species of the arachnid class.

From several spinnerets at the rear of her abdomen, the spider produces the silky threads that form the frame of her web. Once the frame is finished, she attaches radial lines outward from the center, using a non-sticky silk. Finally, she spins a spiral of sticky thread around the radial lines.

About an hour has passed, and her web is almost two feet in diameter. With her morning’s work complete, she rests and waits for visitors. During the day, she alternately sunbathes and removes flies, aphids, grasshoppers, wasps and mosquitoes from Miss Muffet's vegetable garden. She makes no move to bother plants or people.

As evening falls, the spider prepares to pack up for the night. Naturally tidy, she deconstructs her web and eats it. She will have plenty of material to build a fresh one in the morning.

Miss Muffet might not appreciate it, but she has gotten a lot of help in her garden today. And the spider's assitance doesn't end there. Near the end of her life, she will provide the garden with lots of replacements. After she mates and lays her egg sac in a corner of one of her webs, she will die. In the spring, upwards of a thousand new garden spiders will emerge from their protective sac and set off to take up residence in gardens and fields.

Miss M. could recruit many of these spiders to help in her garden by following the advice of Susan Riechert, distinguished service professor in the University of Tennessee Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Riechert, who has done quite a bit of work with spiders, recommends inviting many different spiders to move in.

"If you were to include an entire spider community (20 to 100 species of different sizes with different feeding habits) in a mixed vegetable garden, you could get a reduction of between 60 to 80 percent in pest damage over what would occur if spiders were removed," she said.

So, now that you’ve stopped screeching, running and reaching for the flyswatter and chemical pest spray, what can you do to make your garden spider-friendly?

"The key is to get the spiders to stay in the garden if they balloon or wander in," Riechert said. "You need some kind of ground cover, as in hay mulch, between rows and around plants."

Now what are you waiting for? Get off your tuffet and start mulching.