Eastwoodhill Arboretum was the life’s work of its creator, William Douglas Cook, who came to Gisborne district in 1910 to take up 250 hectares of farm land from the Ngatapa subdivision.
Although Douglas Cook started out as a farmer his ambition was to plant trees and, over the next fifty five years spent at Eastwoodhill, he estimated he brought in about 5,000 different species and cultivars of trees and shrubs creating the largest collection of Northern Hemisphere trees and shrubs in the Southern Hemisphere.