Anyone who has taken the short detour off the South Gippsland Highway to visit Cranbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens will know they are a magnificent attraction.
But surely that doesn't explain why 4956 people moved into the surrounding area last year, enough to make quasi-rural Cranbourne East Australia's second fastest-growing suburb.
It is the lure of cheap land, and the first-home buyer's fast-fading opportunity to purchase an affordable house in Melbourne, that is drawing them by the thousands.
And like other ballooning suburbs on the urban fringe, the land is cheap because it is such a long way from the CBD (a bit over an hour's drive via the Monash in light traffic) and has almost no public transport.
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There are just two bus routes, both of which go nowhere near the newest estates, for a population of 24,000 and rising.
So getting around will inevitably mean cars, cars, cars for the residents of Cranbourne East, one for each adult member of each family.
Just ask the people of Point Cook and Doreen how well all that car dependence by design works, when simply getting out of the suburb in the morning peak has become a teeth-grindingly epic odyssey.
The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals nine of the city's 10 fastest-growing suburbs are on the urban fringe.
Only Melbourne's CBD, which welcomed 2000 new residents last year, bucked the trend.
Urban expansion (or sprawl) is still the main way in which Melbourne's population growth is managed, generally in a case of put the housing in first, work out how to add (and pay for) the supporting infrastructure later.
The house and land packages are comparatively cheap in growth belt suburbs such as South Morang, Craigieburn, Point Cook and Tarneit, but their heavy reliance on cars adds billions of dollars in social costs such as lost personal time, lost productivity through congestion and poor health due to air pollution, as a report by Melbourne's interface councils, One Melbourne or Two?, documents.
Photo: Wayne Taylor
In the case of Cranbourne East (above), there is at least a defunct railway corridor beyond the Cranbourne terminus to give its settlers on the urban frontier hope of one day plugging into the heavy rail network, a dotted line in the Melway with two "proposed" railway stations circled on the map.
But it barely goes without saying there is no government plan to build the two stations, and even Public Transport Victoria's long-term rail blueprint estimates they're about 20 years away.
The best hope for the residents is probably to make the case for reviving the line into a state political arms race, as the new suburb of Mernda successfully did at the last state election.
They too were told by PTV to wait another 15 years for their first trains, only to revolt and threaten to turn against the government. Both sides of politics tuned in and two years later the shovels are already in the ground, just two years away from opening.
Vote buying is of course the other way we do transport planning in Victoria.