Banksia acuminata is a rare prostrate shrub endemic to south-west Western Australia. It was published in 1848 as Dryandra preissii, but transferred into Banksia as B. acuminata in 2007. Description It grows as a prostrate shrub with a lignotuber or underground stems. The leaves are from 7 to 15 cm long, on a petiole from 2 to 6 cm in length. They are finely divided almost back to the midrib, into narrow lobes up to 4 cm in length. Lobes near the leaf tip are sometimes themselves so divided. Flowers occur in the dome-shaped head characteristic of B. ser. Dryandra. These occur at the end of branches, either alone or in clusters, and are subtended by leaves. They are orange-yellow in colour, and up to three centimetres in diameter. Each head contain from 50 to 70 flowers, arranged in a ring about a central hollow, in the manner normally associated with members of the former series Dryandra ser. Niveae. This is surrounded by a great many involucral bracts that are narrow and taper to a long point. As in all Proteaceae, individual flowers consist of a tubular perianth made up of four united tepals fused with the anthers, and one long wiry pistil. The pistil end is initially trapped inside the upper perianth parts, but breaks free at anthesis. In B. acuminata, the perianth is 24–25 mm long, pale pink at the base and mauve above, with sticky hairs on the base. The pistil is 29–40 mm long, and cream or pink in colour. The fruit is a woody follicle firmly embedded in the woody base of the flower head, and usually containing a single winged seed. Taxonomy First collected by Ludwig Preiss near the Gordon River on 7 November 1840, it was published as Dryandra preissii by Carl Meissner in 1845, in the first volume of Plantae Preissianae. Meissner did not give an etymology for the specific epithet, but it is accepted that the name honours the collector. When Meissner published his taxonomic arrangement of Dryandra in 1856, he placed D. preissii with D. bipinnatifida (now Banksia bipinnatifida) in D. sect. Diplophragma, because the leaves of both species are twice divided. This arrangement was rejected in 1870 by George Bentham, who recognised that leaf characters are largely irrelevant for the purposes of systematics. Bentham's arrangement was based on flower and fruit characters; noting the similarity of the flowers of