collina is a shrub that grows along the east coast of Australia, in Queensland and New South Wales.

collina was first published as Banksia collina by Robert Brown in 1810, based on specimens he found among hills in the vicinity of the Hunter River, New South Wales in New South Wales in 1802.

[1][3] Brown did not give an explicit reason for the specific epithet "collina", but it is universally accepted that it is from the Latin collinus ("of hills"), in reference to the topography of the area in which he first found it.

[4] The species is in fact not restricted to hilly terrain, so the specific epithet is misleading.

[7] The following year a taxonomic synonym was published: seeds of this variety must have been sent to Russia, as in 1857 the name Banksia guentheri was published by Eduard August von Regel, based on material cultivated in Leningrad; this has since been declared a taxonomic synonym of B. spinulosa var.

[1][8] 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.

[10] This application of the principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries,[11] and Banksia L.f. was formally conserved and Sirmuellera rejected in 1940.

collina's taxonomic placement 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.

[14][15][16] Early in 2007, Mast and Thiele initiated a rearrangement of Banksia by merging Dryandra into it, and publishing B. subg.

There are also outlying populations at Carnarvon National Park (around 500 kilometres from any other population), Crows Nest and Mount Barney National Park in Queensland, and at Boonoo Boonoo.

It tolerates a range of soil conditions and aspects, survives frosts down to at least −8 °C (18 °F), and may be pruned heavily.

[4] Commercial forms of this variety include Banksia "Stumpy Gold" from the NSW Central Coast, and the unusual Banksia "Carnarvon Gold" from Carnarvon National Park.