The oldest licensed toy in history, a coded diary that took five years to crack, and a strategic buyout of more than 4,000 acres to block developers were all the work of the Victorian woman who painted Peter Rabbit. This episode dismantles the cozy image of Beatrix Potter, starting with her isolated childhood in West Brompton, where she and her brother kept bats, mice, and hedgehogs, boiled dead specimens down to skeletons, and where she kept a journal in a homemade cipher from age 14 to 31.

We follow her serious work in mycology, mentored by Charles McIntosh, her success germinating fungal spores on glass plates, the dismissal by Kew Gardens director William Thiselton-Dyer, and the 1897 paper a male colleague had to present to the Linnean Society because women were barred from the room. Blocked from science, she self-published 250 copies of Peter Rabbit in 1901, patented a stuffed toy in 1903, and built a merchandising engine. The conversation covers the death of her fiancé Norman Warne, the purchase of Hill Top Farm, Herdwick sheep and hefted flocks, her 1913 marriage to William Heelis, her alliance with Hardwicke Rawnsley of the National Trust, and the bequest of 16 farms that formed the core of the Lake District National Park.

• The secret cipher journal and the scientific rigor of her childhood observations
• How the Linnean Society and Kew rejected her fungal spore research on the basis of gender
• Self-publishing Peter Rabbit and inventing character licensing with a patented toy
• Why Herdwick sheep are essential to the ecology of the fells
• Using merchandising wealth to outbid timber and housing developers across the Lake District