Biography
Douglas Cook was the second son of William Cook (Aberdeen, Scotland 1855) and Jessie Miller (Glasgow, Scotland 1853). William arrived in Auckland, New Zealand at 8 September 1879 and started working as an accountant with the Bank of New Zealand. Jessie arrived 19 August 1881. They married three weeks later. The first son John Arthur was born 9 September 1882. The family changed home often. At 28 October 1884 Douglas was born in New Plymouth. A daughter named Sheila Mary Melot was born in Auckland at 25 December 1891.
Douglas had a difficult relation with his father and left home when he was 17 years old to go working as a "cowboy" in Hawke's Bay Region. One year later he bought a peach orchard in the neighbourhood of Hastings. The money he needed he borrowed from his father. He bought the orchard of James Nelson Williams, the grandfather of H. B. (Bill) Williams, who would play such an important role in the history of Eastwoodhill 60 years later. Douglas had bad luck. Two times frost destroyed most of the crops. He had to find another job. In a ballot he acquired a part of the Ngatapa settlement, 620 acres (2.5 km2) large. He called his new property "Eastwoodhill", after the house where his mother grew up near Glasgow.
He would live there all the rest of his life, and create a large arboretum, with more than 2,000 different taxa of trees and shrubs. In the early years after his arrival at Ngatapa, the farm was substantially enlarged. But in later years he sold parts of the property again, to gain money for buying trees. In 1965 Douglas Cook sold Eastwoodhill to H. B. (Bill) Williams, who bought the arboretum with the purpose to preserve it for the future.
During World War I Cook fought in Asia, Africa and Europe as a trooper of the Wellington Mounted Rifles and as a gunner in the N.Z. Field Artillery.
William Douglas Cook married Claire Bourne at 20 October 1930. They adopted a son, named Sholto. The marriage did not succeed and Douglas and Claire separated in 1937.
Cook died in 1967, at the age of 83 years, a “plantsman with the soul of a poet and the vision of a philosopher”.
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