It is classified in the series Abietinae, a group of several species of shrubs with small round or oval inflorescences.

Appearing in spring and summer, the inflorescences are round to oval in shape and tan to cream with purple styles.

The individual flowers are light yellow or cream, with the styles and upper floral parts purple.

He gave it the epithet scabrella, a diminutive of the Latin adjective scaber "rough", referring to the leaves.

George placed B. scabrella in subgenus Banksia because of its flower spike, section Oncostylis because its styles are hooked, and the resurrected series Abietinae, which he constrained to contain only round-fruited species.

He initially thought its closest relative to be Banksia leptophylla, which is found in the same region,[1] and later felt it to be B. lanata, which has similarly coloured inflorescences but longer smooth leaves.

[4] In 1996, botanists Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published an arrangement informed by a cladistic analysis of morphological characteristics.

Banksia scabrella appeared in the third of these, initially called the "telmatiaea clade" for its most basal member.

As with George's classification, B. lanata and two subspecies of B. leptophylla emerged as close relatives of B. scabrella, but there was some question over the relationships between all five forms in the clade.

The placement of B. scabrella in George's 1999 arrangement may be summarised as follows:[3] A 2002 study by American botanists Austin Mast and Tom Givnish concurred with Alex George's observations in that molecular analysis mapped out scabrella as one of a clade containing B. lanata, both subspecies of B. leptophylla and B. telmatiaea, with B. grossa as a more distant relative.

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

[7] Banksia scabrella is found in two disjunct areas of scattered populations; the first discovered being southeast of the small town of Walkaway south of Geraldton, while a more populous cluster is found southeast of Mount Adams in Western Australia.

[14] Burma Road Nature Reserve is one of the few protected conservation areas in its range; there, Banksia scabrella is found most commonly in (and forms a prominent part of) a mallee sedgeland, which is dominated by the cord rush Ecdeiocolea monostachya as a ground cover, and the mallee Eucalyptus eudesmoides as an emergent species.

[15] An assessment of the potential impact of climate change on this species found that its range is unlikely to contract and may actually grow, depending on how effectively it migrates into newly habitable areas.