Backyard gardeners and fans of fresh food scored victories during this year’s legislative session as lawmakers passed a bill aimed at increasing the buying power of the poor at farmers markets while also passing a measure designed to ensure the free flow of seeds outside stores.

Somewhere, Priscilla probably smiles. Legendary even before she was memorialized in a 2008 children’s book, Priscilla, her last name lost to history, was a slave sold to a Native American from a Georgia plantation during the first half of the 19 th century. Whilst on the Trail of Tears with her master in the 1830s, she was purchased in southern Illinois by Basil Silkwood, an innkeeper who gave Priscilla her freedom. Her memory comes alive each summer at the historic Silkwood Inn in Mulkeytown, where hollyhocks bloom, thanks to seeds that Priscilla had taken with her from Georgia in memory of her mother, who had planted and loved the flowers. As the story goes, Priscilla carried the seeds in her apron.

You can’t find seeds for Priscilla’s hollyhocks at the local hardware store, or at Walmart or on Amazon. The seeds come from the labors of Cindy Webb, a volunteer with the West Franklin County Historical District and Silkwood Inn Museum, who takes care to wear rubber gloves when harvesting so that the oils from her hands don’t kill the seeds before they get started – hollyhock seeds are finicky that way, Webb says. In a good year, she gathers more than 100 packets, each packet containing a tablespoon of seeds that are sold for a $1 donation at the historic inn.

It’s not the sort of endeavor that would draw interest from Burpee or Monsanto or any other big-time seed company. For one thing, it takes Webb a couple of days to harvest seeds that sell for a buck per packet. For another, it’s impossible to say what color the blooms will be, and so picking an advertising picture would be tough. But the plant is nonetheless inspiring.

“When opening the package, I felt I was uncovering an ancient treasure and my hands actually trembled as I held one of the plants in my hands,” writes Benjamin Hill, a gardening blogger in California who tracked down some plants after discovering Priscilla’s story on a gardening website. “How humbling to hold a plant that originates from a plant so treasured by such an incredible child.”

Thanks to the Illinois General Assembly, such moments can continue as lawmakers have passed a bill to ensure that seed exchanges not done for a commercial purpose can continue unfettered by state regulators. It costs $9 to inspect a single batch of seeds to determine purity and whether pests or pathogens are presents, proponents of the bill say, defeating the purpose of seed exchanges that are typically accomplished without money changing hands.

Lawmakers acted after Pennslvania and Minnesota began enforcing laws that treated so-called seed libraries and exchanges as commercial enterprises subject to testing, labeling, permitting and other forms of government regulation. Concerns about noxious weeds being spread, intentionally or otherwise, via seed exchanges done for love rather than profit were addressed by requiring that organizers of seed exchanges keep records of the origins of seeds in the event the Department of Agriculture chooses to investigate cases of suspicious weeds.

Rebecca Osland, policy associate with the Illinois Stewardship Alliance that pushed the bill, says that concerns about weeds spreading are overblown. Gardeners gather seeds by hand to exchange with other gardeners, she says, and so it’s not likely that a weed seed would get passed on, nor is it likely that anyone would intentionally contaminate a batch of seeds in an effort to spread weeds.

“If someone had that intention, my argument was, why would they bother to go through a seed library?” Osland says. “They’d just toss them (seeds) in a field.”

Seed exchanges can be big deals. Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest seed producers in the United States, is a nonprofit based in Iowa that has been collecting and distributing seeds since 1975, both selling seeds in stores and facilitating exchanges of seeds between members of the organization throughout the world.

In addition to protecting seed exchanges, lawmakers also passed a bill that would increase the buying power of the poor at farmers markets throughout the state. Under the bill, the state would provide $1 million to help people with Link cards buy fresh food at farmers markets by offering a dollar-for-dollar match for such purchases so that $5 from a Link card could buy $10 worth of vegetables or other foodstuffs.

Legislators must still appropriate funds to make the program work, so the lack of a state budget could leave the new program without funds. Even without state money, proponents say it’s been working in Chicago, Springfield and a few other areas thanks to private grants. More than $370,000 in coupons that double the value of Link card purchases have been used at farmers markets since private efforts began in 2009, backers of the bill say.

“It’s very, very difficult to get funding for all of the downstate (farmers) markets,” said Connie Spreen, executive director of Experimental Station, a south Chicago organization that runs a farmers market in the Windy City. “This would enable the program to expand and provide enough funding to meet the needs of other Link customers (outside Chicago).”