[1] They are medium to large trees whose natural range is from eastern India through southern China and southward through the Malay Peninsula.

Plantations of the young trees must be fenced against cattle and deer which eat whatever leaves they can reach.

If Exbucklandia is grown in the open, the trunk forks and branches are retained close to the ground.

In the forest, where it usually grows, the trunk is single, straight, and free of branches for 9 to 18 metres.

Exbucklandia tonkinensis is native to southeastern China, Laos, and northern Vietnam.

Exbucklandia longipetala has a much more restricted range, being known only from the Guangxi and Guizhou provinces of China.

[6] Further field work will be needed to determine whether these are three distinct entities and whether the specimens assigned to Exbucklandia populnea represent a single species or two.

The largest known individual of Exbucklandia populnea grew to 45 meters in the Darjeeling Hills of India.

[3] The phylogeny of Hamamelidaceae has not been resolved with much certainty, but in one recent molecular phylogenetic study, Exbucklandia and Rhodoleia formed the most basal clade in the family.

[8] Chunia bucklandioides, a rare tree from Hainan which has never been sampled for DNA, might also be a member of this clade.

[2] Exbucklandia oregonensis grew in the northwestern United States during the Oligocene and Miocene epochs.

Exbucklandia tengchongensis is known from fossils recovered from a diatomite mine in Tengchong County in Yunnan, China.

In 1825, the name Bucklandia was published for a fossil cycad in the "Tentamen" part of Flora der Vorwelt, the classic paleobotanical work by Kaspar Maria von Sternberg.

van Steenis sought to resolve the conflict of names in 1952 by replacing Bucklandia with Symingtonia.

[18] In that paper, van Steenis transferred the second species to Exbucklandia, because Roland Brown had not explicitly done so in 1946.

Thus van Steenis originated the combination Exbucklandia tonkinensis, but not validly, because he failed to cite the publication of the basionym as the ICBN has required since 1953.