After 24 years, Ron Wilson left his nationally syndicated In The Garden Saturday morning show based at WKRC-AM by urging his listeners to “make every weekend the best weekend of your life.”
Wilson, on his final 6-9 a.m. show last Saturday, “tossed the keys” to the new host, Scott Beuerlein, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s manager of botanical garden outreach and columnist for Horticulture Magazine.
The modest Wilson, who calls himself “your personal yard boy,” is heard on more than 50 stations. His show, distributed by iHeartMedia’s Premiere Network, also is available as a podcast.
He left the air Saturday, without any fanfare, with Beuerlein at his side. He told listeners that he was “gonna hang up the cans today,” radio slang for headphones, “and then I'm gonna go home.”
Long-time friend and colleague Gary Sullivan, who hosts the national At Home fix-it show after Wilson at 9 a.m., told Wilson’s audience that his low-key goodbye was not unexpected.
“You are a very humble man, and most people would make a huge deal. And of course you're not,” said Sullivan. Wilson has been doing local TV or radio appearances since 1991, Sullivan said.
When I reached out through Sullivan to interview Wilson about his career, Wilson declined by saying:
“Please tell him thank you, but I am going to pass . . . but really appreciate the thought. BUT I do have a request. Instead could he write something that maybe highlights a new garden show starting Saturday, Feb 28 on 55KRC…Let’s Garden with Scott Beuerlein? It would be a great way to give Scott a nice boost to the beginning of his show and a new gardening era.”
Beuerlein says it’s “incredibly daunting” to replace Wilson, who he described on Facebook as “an amazing, across- the-board horticultural wizard. He knows everything!”
“There will never be another Ron Wilson. His knowledge of every aspect of 'yardening' — from turf to houseplants to petunias to shade trees — is breathtaking. That he combined that expertise with a fun, friendly, always helpful personality made him a perfect host for a gardening program. He’s a really tough act to follow! An impossible act to follow,” Beuerline tells me.
Beuerlein was asked about doing the show after Scott Reinhart, operations manager for Cincinnati’s iHeartMedia stations, contacted the zoo seeking a gardening host. Throughout the transition, Wilson did not say why he wanted to leave radio, Beuerlein says.
“I think he’s uncomfortable drawing attention to himself in general and about this in particular. But it was his desire to leave on his own terms and when he wanted to, which was now.”
Wilson ended the show Saturday by thanking listeners, sponsors and colleagues:
“Thanks all of our callers over the years. Thanks to all of our sponsors, producers . . . I do want you to do yourself a favor. Get out there and keep planting those trees, keep planting those native plants, be pollinator friendly, pam for your worms, get your kids and dogs involved with guarding, and by all means, make every weekend the best weekend of your life.”
Wilson, “more than anyone else,” has encouraged Beuerlein to make changes in the show to fit the new host’s style and personality.
“I will play to my strengths and rely especially on my many friendships and associations with top experts. I’m pretty good at establishing a rapport with people and this will result in compelling conversations. I hope the audience that he has built all these years will stick with me while I figure out how to do radio,” says Beuerline, an Anderson Township resident who grew up in Sharonville helping tend the family’s vegetable plot in a community garden.
When Beuerline bought his first home, “suddenly that gardening gene kicked in hard, prompting a deep passion in plants and gardens and an all-consuming drive to learn as much as I could. I devoured books and magazines and attended all kinds of educational events. I tried things. Failed. Learned. Tried again. And over time, I was fortunate enough to develop friendships and associations with a lot of people with great expertise. It’s been a great journey for someone with a communication arts degree and who was derailed for quite some time by a ‘first’ career,” says Beuerline, a Delta Air Lines customer service agent 1982-2008.
Over the last 20 years, Beuerlein has published hundreds of articles for several publications and online. He’s also a partner and frequent contributor to the Garden Rant blog. He also “writes two columns for Horticulture Magazine — the (hopefully) humorous and/or insightful Deep Roots column and also the Garden Views column in which he interviews some of the green industry’s top professionals. Since 2019, Scott has won two Gold Medals and two Silver Medals from Garden Communicators International. None of this has made him rich,” says his bio.
In addition to working at the zoo, he’s vice president of the Cincinnati Park Board’s Urban Forestry Advisory Board, and a member of the Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum’s board of directors as an advocate for its horticulture legacy; the Boone County Arboretum’s Plant Collections Committee ,and the Anderson Township Street Tree Committee.
He’s past president of the Cincinnati Flower Growers Association, and the Northern Kentucky Urban and Community Forestry Council. He’s also been a guest on WVXU-FM’s Cincinnati Edition talk show.
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