Discovery and naming in December 1801. The sprawling shrub in the foreground has been tentatively identified as
B. verticillata, which would make this sketch, together with another Westall sketch thought to depict
B. verticillata, the earliest known drawings of the species. yet it did not result in formal publication of the species. The next known collection was in December 1801, during the visit of
HMS Investigator to King George Sound. Little is known of the circumstances of this collection, other than what is written on the specimen label: "King Georges Sound Dec[embe]r 1801". The specimen is credited to
Robert Brown, but gardener
Peter Good and the botanical artist
Ferdinand Bauer also contributed to Brown's specimen collection, often without attribution. A more precise date and location cannot be given, as neither Brown nor Good mentions the collection in his diary. Bauer did not publish an illustration of the species and his original field sketches are lost, but
William Westall appears to have incorporated it into two of his field sketches, and certainly included it in the foreground of one of the
oil paintings that he later worked up for the
Admiralty. Brown formally described and named the species in his 1810
On the Proteaceae of Jussieu. He did not identify a
type specimen, but the one specimen in his collection has since been formally declared the
lectotype for the species. He also did not explicitly give an
etymology for the
specific epithet, but it is accepted that the name derives from the
Latin verticillatus ("whorled"), in reference to the whorled leaf arrangement. No
subspecies or
varieties of
Banksia verticillata have been identified and it has no
taxonomic synonyms. In 1891,
Otto Kuntze, in his
Revisio Generum Plantarum, rejected the generic name
Banksia L.f., on the grounds that the name
Banksia had previously been published in 1776 as
Banksia J.R.Forst &
G.Forst, referring to the genus now known as
Pimelea. Kuntze proposed
Sirmuellera as an alternative, referring to this species as
Sirmuellera verticillata. This application of the
principle of priority was largely ignored by Kuntze's contemporaries, and
Banksia L.f. was
formally conserved and
Sirmuellera rejected in 1940.
Infrageneric placement In
Brown's arrangement of Banksia,
B. verticillata was placed between
B. compar (now
B. integrifolia subsp. compar) and
B. coccinea (scarlet banksia) in
phyletic order. No infrageneric arrangement was provided other than the removal of one distinctive species into a subgenus of its own, because of its unusual domed flower head. As
B. verticillata flowers occur in characteristic flower spikes, it was retained in
Banksia verae, the "true banksias".
A more detailed arrangement was published by
Carl Meissner in 1856.
Eubanksia was demoted to sectional rank, and divided it into four series.
B. verticillata was placed in series
Salicinae because its leaves are more or less linear, and have white undersides. Based as they were on leaf characters, Meissner's series were highly heterogeneous, This arrangement would stand for over a century. For many years there was confusion between
B. verticillata and
B. littoralis (swamp banksia). Until 1984, the latter was circumscribed as encompassing what is now
Banksia seminuda (river banksia), which has whorled leaves like
B. verticillata. Thus it was easy to perceive
B. verticillata as falling within the range of variation of this broadly defined species. The confusion was largely cleared up once
B. seminuda was recognised as a distinct
taxon.
Alex George published a new
taxonomic arrangement of
Banksia in his landmark 1981 monograph
The genus Banksia L.f. (Proteaceae). Endlicher's
Eubanksia became
B. subg. Banksia, and was divided into three sections, one of which was
Oncostylis.
Oncostylis was further divided into four series, with
B. verticillata placed in series
Spicigerae because its inflorescences are cylindrical. This clade became the basis of Thiele and Ladiges'
B. subser. Occidentales, which was defined as "characterised by
opposite-decussate seedling leaves and adult leaves in true whorls." (
B. seminuda is omitted because it was not sampled in the study, not because it occurs elsewhere in the cladogram.) ==Distribution and habitat==