It generally grows as a small shrub to 1 m (3 ft) high with long narrow serrated leaves, and bright yellow oval or round inflorescences.

Young branches are densely felted with hairs, but these are lost with age, and eventually replaced with a deeply fissured grey bark.

[1] Oval to spherical in shape, this is from 5 to 9 centimetres (2–4 in) long, and occurs on a short, lateral branchlet arising from an older branch.

"[4] When he published his taxonomic arrangement of Banksia the following year, in B. ser Salicinae on account of its linear leaves with grey undersides, positioning it between B. cylindrostachya and B. marginata.

[5] When George Bentham published his arrangement in 1870, he abandoned Meissner's series, which were based on leaf characters and therefore unacceptably heterogeneous.

[7] This application of the principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries,[8] and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved and Sirmuellera rejected in 1940.

[11] Thiele and Ladiges' arrangement remained current only until 1999, when George's treatment of the genus for the Flora of Australia series of monographs was published.

Tetragonae:[2] Since 1998, Austin Mast has been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the subtribe Banksiinae.

His analyses suggest a phylogeny that is very greatly different from George's arrangement, with B. lindleyana appearing in a clade with B. menziesii, B. ashbyi and B. sceptrum.

[12][13][14] A 2013 molecular study by Marcel Cardillo and colleagues using chloroplast DNA and combining it with earlier results reaffirmed B. lindleyana as an offshoot of a lineage that gave rise to B. ashbyi and B.

It grows in shrubland on deep yellow sand, in the swales of coastal dunes and inland on flat sandplain.

It fares best in a sunny location in deep calcareous sand, and grows well in Perth soils, although not so well in cooler climates.