Beth Botts, award-winning and recently-laid-off garden writer for the Chicago Tribune, has taken Whet’s advice. Her new blog, Growing in Chicago, covers just that. Also, nice to note she was as underwhelmed by GreenFest as I was the first year it hit McCormick Place.

To wit:

“Overall, it seemed less an event to focus on real environmental issues and action and more of a pretext for a sort of morally pretentious consumerism. “Save the world by shopping” is a proposition that didn’t go over well with me when President Greorge W. Bush made it after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it doesn’t go over any better coming from the other end of the political spectrum. 

“And apart from us and our herbs, and the booth of Pizzo and Associates, the natural areas restoration firm out in Leland (I had a nice chat with Jack Pizzo), there was hardly a plant to be found. The “green” in “Green Festival” is not the kind that comes from chlorophyll.”