An iconic Australian wildflower and popular garden plant, they are easily recognised by their characteristic flower spikes and fruiting "cones".
They grow in forms varying from prostrate woody shrubs to trees up to 35 metres tall, and occur in all but the most arid areas of Australia.
Specimens of Banksia were first collected by Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander, naturalists on HM Bark Endeavour during Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook's 1770 voyage to the Pacific Ocean.
[1] This arrangement would stand for over a hundred years, before finally being replaced in 1981 by Alex George's revision, published in his landmark monograph The genus Banksia L.f.
[2] In 1996, Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges published a cladistic analysis of the genus Banksia in the journal Australian Systematic Botany.
He stated that "the infrageneric classification and systematic sequence presented here are modified from that of George (1981) and take into account new data revealed in the work of Thiele & Ladiges (1996)".