They occur in flower spikes from four to seven centimetres long; unusually for Banksia species they are not upright but hang down.

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

[7] In 1996, Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published the results of a cladistic analysis of morphological characters of Banksia.

Nutantes, which Thiele defined in terms of B. nutans' pendent inflorescences, the fragile pellicle of the pollen-presenter, and the wrinkled follicles.

[2] The placement of B. nutans in George's 1999 arrangement may be summarised as follows:[2] Since 1998, Austin Mast has been publishing results of ongoing cladistic analyses of DNA sequence data for the subtribe Banksiinae, which suggest a phylogeny that is very greatly different from George's arrangement.

Mast's results place B. nutans at a substantial phyletic distance from the other members of B. ser.

Abietinae; its nearest outgroup is a clade consisting of the members of Thiele's B. subser.

[9][10][11] Early in 2007, Mast and Thiele initiated a rearrangement of Banksia by merging Dryandra into it, and publishing B. subg.

[12] B. nutans grows along the south coast of Western Australia between Albany and Cape Pasley.

There are two main centres of distribution: between Albany and Hopetoun and between Scaddan and Cape Pasley.

[13][14] The species grows in depressions, especially amongst consolidated coastal dunes, in white or grey sand, or in gravel.

[16] A 1985-86 field study in the Fitzgerald River National Park found it to be the main summertime food source for the nectar-feeding honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus).