[3] It occurs in shrubland, woodland and kwongan on the south coast of Western Australia between Narrikup and Beaufort Inlet.

[6] Baxter sent to Clapton Nursery a package of Banksia seed labelled "Dryandroides", and this was successfully germinated.

There it was seen by Robert Sweet, who in 1826 listed it under the unpublished manuscript name "Banksia dryandroides" as having been in cultivation in British gardens since 1824.

[7] Two years later, Sweet published a formal description of the species in his Flora Australasica,[8] accompanied by a hand-coloured engraving by Edwin Dalton Smith.

The etymology of dryandroides was not explicitly given, but Sweet offered the English common name Dryandra-like Banksia.

Australian botanist Alex George has since designated as neotype one of Baxter's specimen sheets located at the British Museum (Natural History), labelled "Banksia new Seeds marked Dryandroides".

[13] This application of the principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries,[14] and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved and Sirmuellera rejected in 1940.

[17] When George Bentham published a revised arrangement in his 1870 Flora Australiensis, he discarded Meissner's series, placing all the species with hooked styles together in a section that he named Oncostylis.

Under George's 1999 arrangement of Banksia, B. dryandroides's taxonomic placement may be summarised as follows:[20] Since 1998, American botanist Austin Mast and coauthors have been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the Proteaceae subtribe Banksiinae, which includes Banksia.

Their 2002 analysis inferred a tree in which B. dryandroides was sister to a clade containing B. pulchella (Teasel Banksia) and B. meisneri var.

Grandes Further analyses published in 2005 yielded results largely consistent with this, except that B. tricuspis may be much more closely related to this species than previously thought.

[23] Banksia dryandroides ranges near the south coast of Western Australia from Narrikup to Beaufort Inlet.

It grows in clay-loam, sandy loam or gravel-based soils on low-lying areas, in shrubland and low woodland.