At the base of a power tower is a cluster of beefy orange blooms of Turk’s cap lily. Nearby, purple prairie clover’s delicate wands decorate the grassy growth. Yet pretty as these flowers are, they are just a means to an end for the plants and me. Seeds are what we want.

Prairie survives in some surprising places. This one is under the power lines in Bridgeview, a suburb southwest of Chicago. There are condos to the east and train tracks to the west. Beyond the train tracks is the I-294 expressway. The prairie is a wedge about 200 feet wide and half a mile long. The power lines tower over it like the protector that they are. The prairie is in good shape despite the dumpers and the dirt-bikers, let alone the dramatic alteration of the landscape surrounding it. In March, a spark from a passing train set the dry stalks aflame.

I walk north, pausing to collect some hoary puccoon seed. In May, the simple orange-yellow, forget-me-not flowers of this plant dotted this area. Now these plants are harder to find. But I have an eye for them. Their seeds are hard to collect because they ripen slowly over the period of a month and drop once they ripen. Most of them have already fallen, but I collect what I can. Puccoon seeds look like little battleship gray incisors. You pick at them to see if they are loose. It helps to have fingernails that are not too short.

I rattle my collection of puccoon seeds around in a pill container. Thankfully, most native plants are long-lived perennials. This means that you can collect seeds without worrying about harming the population. A good rule of thumb is not to collect more than 50 percent of the seed.

Collecting seed is a two-part equation. The first part requires you to recognize when seed is ripe. The second part requires you to understand the plant’s place in the landscape so that you scatter the seed in appropriate habitat.

Puccoon likes lots of sun and drier conditions. This seed will go into the Palos Forest Preserves a few miles to the west. A lot of the forest preserves were heavily grazed or farmed before the Forest Preserve District of Cook County bought them. There are plenty of places where puccoon should grow.

It’s hard to believe that a mere 180 years ago there weren’t just isolated individual parcels of prairie but a continuous whole owned by no one. Dealing with nature today means dealing with various landowners and agencies. In the past a seed might get moved from one place to another by hitching a ride on a bison’s hide. Now getting seed from this site to a forest preserve requires a different process. I walk this prairie with Commonwealth Edison biologist Jon Keener and work with the Forest Preserve District’s Land Management staff. Land stewards like me need to make human connections to restore the natural connections.

The deep pink flowers of marsh phlox gleam from a wet spot. But in a drier area ahead are the plants that I seek. They have shriveled already and are done for the year. They are the marsh phlox’s drier cousin, the prairie phlox. The marsh phlox’s stem is smooth while the prairie phlox’s is hairy. To capture the prairie phlox’s seed, I attached stocking feet to the plants with a twistie. When the seed is ripe, it falls into the stocking where I can collect it. As I collect these seed pouches, the power lines crackle. A red-winged blackbird on the telephone line along the train tracks squawks.

There is a lot more summer left, a lot more flowers and seeds to come. I will collect about 30 different species here by the time the season’s through. Before I leave, I pause by the Turk’s cap lilies and the purple prairie clovers. Come September, I’ll be back for some of their seed.