Ferny Creek

Ferny Creek is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 33 km south-east of Melbourne's central business district.

Ferny Creek is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 33 km south-east of Melbourne's central business district. Its local government area is the Shire of Yarra Ranges. At the 2016 census, Ferny Creek had a population of 1,518.The suburb is built around and to the south of Dunns Hill (height 561m) with most of Ferny Creek lying between 400 and 500 metres above sea level. It is named after Ferny Creek, a small stream which originates to the south of Dunns Hill in the centre of the suburb.

The suburb of Ferny Creek is largely surrounded by conservation zones and national parks, with the Dandenong Ranges national park on its northern and western sides, the Upwey habitat corridor to the south and Sherbrooke Forest to the east.

For at least 35,000 years, the Wurundjeri people have been the traditional custodians of the land within the Yarra Ranges including Ferny Creek. Europeans settlers established themselves there from the 1830s, pursuing gold along the rivers and carving out productive agricultural lands. Later prominent Melbourne figures built weekend cottages in the region. Ferny Creek is well known for its established European gardens, and beautiful range of native fauna and flora. The Post Office opened around August 1904 as One Tree Hill, and was subsequently renamed Ferny Creek.

Ferny Creek's climate is cool and wet, with temperature extremes rare due to the proximity of Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait.

Rainfall is fairly uniform through the year, tending to peak between April and October with lower rainfall during the months of January and February. The mean annual rainfall is between 1100 and 1500 mm, increasing with elevation and from west to east. The elevation means that temperatures are typically 3 to 5 °C cooler than the lower suburbs of Melbourne, to the west of Ferny Creek.As a result of its elevation snow typically falls one or two times a year, mostly between the months of June and October. A rare summer snow occurred on Christmas Day 2006 . The local region has experienced substantial warming in recent decades and heavy snowfalls which were once common have become rare. The last significant snowfall to affect Ferny Creek was on 10 August 2008 when as much as 15 cm of snow fell around Dunns Hill. A Bureau of Meteorology weather station sits at an elevation of 513 m in the Ferny Creek Reserve.