William Douglas Cook - Not An Ordinary Farmer

Not An Ordinary Farmer

Douglas Cook wrote, in 1963: "I never was a farmer. That was only a means of living in the country and being my own boss. I never could stand taking orders and loved roaming the hills". He spend most of his money on plants, rather than investing it in his farm. And apart from that he was a nudist, and used to work only in a pair of boots and a sun hat. Bob Berry, who got involved in the development of Eastwoodhill in the 1950s (and still is involved in it up till now) remembers his "puckish sense of humour".

William Douglas Cook might be called “a passionate man, not because of his somewhat mercurial personal relationships, but he certainly showed an undeviating passion for planting trees over a lifetime”. His passion really took form after he took possession of the 260 ha property of Eastwoodhill in 1910. “After just six weeks a garden was shaping up, and by the end of the first year he had filled sixteen pages of his notebook with details of plantings".

Cook went back to Britain again in 1922 and 1924, to get new inspiration for his dream of establishing a park of his own.

After the second World War there was another impetus to Douglas Cook for collecting as much different trees as possible at Eastwoodhill. He was afraid that Europe would be destroyed in a new (nuclear) war and saw his plantings as a repository for good garden material.

Mortimer states that there “is a fair amount of information about what he bought (…), but not much about where he put them or what their fate was. He was essentially a collector (and a muddler), buying one of everything he hadn't got”.