Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

Welcome everybody.

We're here in the company of the marvellous horto biographer and garden writer Anna Paveord. And we're going to examine the life and career of that great red rafter of landscape, the man who's been called England's greatest gardener, Lancelot, Capability Brown, who was born 300 years ago this year, and whose garden designs include those of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the marvellous Petworth House in Sussex, and Burley House near Stamford, where I believe, Anna, you once had a writing hut. Is that right? Yes, oh, that was such a great hut. It was one of those things, a bit like what they now rather poshly called shepherd's huts.

It didn't have the wheels, but it was what they now rather poshly call Shepherds

huts. It didn't have the wheels, but it was all made out of wood, and it just sat there in Capability

Brown's Park. And so I sat there in the bit that they called the Middle Park, which was actually

a sort of ornamental farm, because this is something that Capability Brown did that people don't

talk about as much as his great landscapes. He was also a builder. And here at the dairy farm,

as it was called, he actually made the most beautiful buildings in the Gothic style because the

park wasn't just there to be looked at and ooed and ard over and

you know telling sort of how wonderful the mist was on the morning on the on the water that

morning it was also actually about farming because in the middle of the of the 18th century when

capability Brown was was was at its sort of you know his his work was at its peak

landowners were also extremely interested in making the best sort of sort of well profit to put it

so boldly out of their lands as they could. It was the spirit of improvement,

and that actually was attaching to the agriculture

as much as it was to the gardening.

And this, it said, is how he got his nickname,

because Capability Brown, I mean, that's a wonderful nickname, isn't it?

And they said that he got it,

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