Banksia Nobilis - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

Specimens of B. nobilis were first collected in the 1830s by James Drummond from the vicinity of the Swan River Colony. The species was published under the name Dryandra nobilis by John Lindley in his 1840 A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony, where he referred to it as "a most splendid plant in the way of D. longifolia and tenuifolia, with leaves from a foot to a foot and half long". Lindley did not specify his type material, and there is no type at the University of Cambridge Herbarium, where most of Lindley's type specimens are lodged. However most of A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony is based upon the collections of Drummond, and one of Drummond's specimens has since been selected as lectotype for the species. Lindley also proffered no etymology for the specific epithet, but it is accepted that it comes from the Latin nobilis ("noble, imposing") in reference to the purportedly noble appearance of the plant.

In addition to plant specimens, Drummond also sent seeds of D. nobilis to England. Plants were raised from Drummond's seeds, and in 1852 one of them flowered, making D. nobilis one of only two dryandras known to have flowered in Europe from Drummond's seed. The flowering specimen was about seven years old at the time, and about four feet high. It became the basis for a lithographed plate by Walter Hood Fitch, which was featured in Volume 78 of Curtis's Botanical Magazine. By this time, however, the enthusiasm for Proteaceae that prevailed among horticulturalists in the 1840s had waned, and D. nobilis would be the last dryandra to feature in Curtis's Botanical Magazine.

Text accompanying Fitch's plate by William Jackson Hooker suggested that Carl Meissner considered their specimen to be the then unpublished species Dryandra runcinata, but this was a mis-identification: D. runcinata is now considered a synonym of Banksia squarrosa rather than this species.

The species has had a fairly uneventful taxonomic history since publication, with only three events of taxonomic interest since publication. In 1891, Otto Kuntze made an unsuccessful attempt to transfer the genus Dryandra into the name Josephia, in the process publishing the name Josephia nobilis for this species. That name is now considered a nomenclatural synonym of B. nobilis. In 1996 Alex George published a subspecies, D. nobilis subsp. fragrans (now B. nobilis subsp. fragrans), therefore also invoking the autonym D. nobilis subsp. nobilis (now B. nobilis subsp. nobilis) to encompass the type material. Finally, in 2007 the genus Dryandra was transferred into Banksia by Austin Mast and Kevin Thiele, resulting in the publication of the current name for this species, Banksia nobilis (Lindl.) A.R.Mast & K.R.Thiele.