It occurs on lateritic rises from Eneabba to Katanning in the state's Southwest Botanic Province.

With large pinnatifid leaves with triangular lobes, and a golden or reddish pink inflorescence, it is a popular garden plant.

[1][2] Specimens of B. nobilis were first collected in the 1830s by James Drummond from the vicinity of the Swan River Colony.

The species was published under the name Dryandra nobilis by John Lindley in his 1840 A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony,[3] where he referred to it as "a most splendid plant in the way of D. longifolia and tenuifolia, with leaves from a foot to a foot and half long".

It became the basis for a lithographed plate by Walter Hood Fitch, which was featured in Volume 78 of Curtis's Botanical Magazine.

[6] By this time, however, the enthusiasm for Proteaceae that prevailed among horticulturalists in the 1840s had waned, and D. nobilis would be the last dryandra to feature in Curtis's Botanical Magazine.

[2] Text accompanying Fitch's plate by William Jackson Hooker suggested that Carl Meissner considered their specimen to be the then unpublished species Dryandra runcinata, but this was a mis-identification: D. runcinata is now considered a synonym of Banksia squarrosa rather than this species.

[10] Banksia nobilis occurs on lateritic rises from Eneabba in the north to Katanning in the south.

Much of its distribution roughly follows the boundary between the Jarrah Forest and Avon Wheatbelt biogeographic regions, but at its northern limits it extends into the Swan Coastal Plain and Geraldton Sandplains.

It probably requires a similar aspect to subspecies nobilis, but would be better suited to warmer areas.