Sherbrooke Forest is a wet sclerophyll forest within Dandenong Ranges National Park, 40 km east of Melbourne, in Victoria,

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

, close to the suburb of Belgrave. It lies within an altitude of 220–500 m asl and is dominated by the tallest flowering plant in the world; mountain ash ('' Eucalyptus regnans'').

History

Sherbrooke Forest is situated within the historic territory of the indigenous Wurundjeri clan, of the Woiwurrung people, of the Kulin nation. From the mid-19th century until 1930 the forest was logged. In 1958 it was gazetted as a park, and in 1987 it was merged with Doongalla Reserve and

Ferntree Gully Ferntree Gully is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), Victoria, Australia, at the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, 30 km south-east of Melbourne's Melbourne City Centre, Central Business District, located within the City of Kn ...

National Park to form the 32.15 km² Dandenong Ranges National Park.

Attractions

Grants Picnic Ground is located within the forest. This site features a kiosk, public toilets, drinking fountains, and park benches. Sherbrooke Falls is a small waterfall that can be accessed via the walking trails. Puffing Billy Railway runs through the southernmost edge of Sherbrooke Forest, near the Belgrave terminus.

Fauna and flora

The dominant tree species in Sherbrooke Forest is the mountain ash (''Eucalyptus regnans''), which is the tallest flowering plant in the world, and the second tallest plant overall, after the

California redwood ''Sequoia sempervirens'' ()''Sunset Western Garden Book,'' 1995:606–607 is the sole living species of the genus '' Sequoia'' in the cypress family Cupressaceae (formerly treated in Taxodiaceae). Common names include coast redwood, coastal ...

(''Sequoia sempervirens''). The understory consists of a variety of plants, including many tree ferns. Sherbrooke Forest is famous for its population of superb lyrebirds (''Menura novaehollandiae'') and was an early, and still important, site for the study and conservation of this species. One of the early lyrebird researchers and

sound recordists In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

of the 1930s was

Raymond Littlejohns Raymond Trewolla Littlejohns (13 August 1893 - 22 January 1961) was an Australian accountant, amateur ornithologist and bird photographer. Reputation Littlejohns is especially known for his efforts in photography and sound recording of the ly ...

. Another researcher who analysed lyrebird song was

Konstantin Halafoff Konstantin Ciryl Halafoff or K. C. Halafoff (1902–1969) was a Russian white emigre and Australian poet and ornithologist interested in the musicology of bird song. Halafoff was born in 1902 in Moscow. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia ...

References

External links

Dandenong Ranges National Park

Friends of Sherbrooke Forest

iNaturalist
Forests of Victoria (Australia) 1958 establishments in Australia Sclerophyll forests {{VictoriaAU-geo-stub