Sherbrooke Forest is a wet

sclerophyll Sclerophyll is a type of vegetation that is adapted to long periods of dryness and heat. The plants feature hard leaves, short Internode (botany), internodes (the distance between leaves along the stem) and leaf orientation which is parallel or ...

forest within

Dandenong Ranges National Park The Dandenong Ranges National Park is a national park located in the Greater Melbourne region of Victoria, Australia. The national park is situated from at its westernmost points at Ferntree Gully and Boronia to at its easternmost point at ...

, 40 km east of Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia, close to the suburb of

Belgrave Belgrave may refer to: Places *Belgrave, Cheshire, an English village *Belgrave, Leicester an English district *Belgrave, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia **Belgrave railway line **Belgrave railway station, Melbourne **Belgrave (Puffing B ...

. It lies within an altitude of 220–500 m

asl American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employ ...

and is dominated by the tallest

flowering plant Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (). The term angiosperm is derived from the Ancient Greek, Greek words (; 'container, vessel') and (; 'seed'), meaning that the seeds are enclosed with ...

in the world: mountain ash (''

Eucalyptus regnans ''Eucalyptus regnans'', known variously as mountain ash (in Victoria), giant ash or swamp gum (in Tasmania), or stringy gum, is a species of very tall forest tree that is native to the Australia states of Tasmania and Victoria. It is a straigh ...

'').

History

Sherbrooke Forest is situated within the historic territory of the indigenous

Wurundjeri The Wurundjeri people are an Aboriginal peoples, Aboriginal people of the Woiwurrung language, Woiwurrung language group, in the Kulin nation. They are the traditional owners of the Yarra River Valley, covering much of the present location of ...

clan, of the

Woiwurrung The Woiwurrung, also spelt Woi-wurrung, Woi Wurrung, Woiwurrong, Woiworung, and Wuywurung, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Woiwurrung language group, in the Kulin alliance. The Woiwurrung people's territory in Central Victoria ex ...

people, of the

Kulin nation The Kulin nation is an alliance of five Aboriginal nations in the south of Australia - up into the Great Dividing Range and the Loddon and Goulburn River valleys - which shares Culture and Language. History Before British colonisation, the ...

. 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, at the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, 30 km east of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the City of Knox local government area. Ferntree Gully recorded a p ...

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 A waterfall is any point in a river or stream where water flows over a vertical drop or a series of steep drops. Waterfalls also occur where meltwater drops over the edge of a tabular iceberg or ice shelf. Waterfalls can be formed in seve ...

that can be accessed via the walking trails.

Puffing Billy Railway The Puffing Billy Railway is a Narrow gauge railway, narrow gauge heritage railway in the southern foothills of the Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne, Australia. The railway was one of the five narrow gauge lines of the Victorian Railways, narr ...

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, coast ...

(''Sequoia sempervirens''). The

understory In forestry and ecology, understory (American English), or understorey (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), also known as underbrush or undergrowth, includes plant life growing beneath the Canopy (biology), forest ca ...

consists of a variety of plants, including many

tree fern Tree ferns are arborescent (tree-like) ferns that grow with a trunk (botany), trunk elevating the fronds above ground level, making them trees. Many extant tree ferns are members of the order Cyatheales, to which belong the families Cyatheaceae ( ...

s. Sherbrooke Forest is famous for its population of

superb lyrebird The superb lyrebird (''Menura novaehollandiae'') is an Australian passerine songbird, one of two species from the family Menuridae, with the other being the much rarer Albert's lyrebird. It is one of the world's largest songbirds, and is re ...

s (''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 br ...

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 l ...

. Another researcher who analysed lyrebird

song A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...

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 Russi ...

References

External links

Dandenong Ranges National Park

Friends of Sherbrooke Forest

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