and uniformly cream. Old flowers soon fall from the flower heads, revealing a woody dome with 1 to 6 follicles embedded in it. These are a mottled grey colour, smooth, and shortly furry. They are oval-shaped, measuring long by high by wide. Each follicle contains up to two winged seeds, from long. Banksia oligantha is most easily distinguished from the other two species in B. subg. Isostylis by its smaller leaves, flowers and fruit. Its foliage is also not as prickly as that of B. cuneata. Taxonomy Discovery and naming Banksia oligantha was discovered by Ken Wallace of the Government of Western Australia's Department of Conservation and Land Management (now the Department of Environment and Conservation) in September 1984, during a survey of Wangeling Gully Nature Reserve (Nature Reserve 9098), about northwest of Wagin. Two months later, on 18 November 1984, Anne Taylor collected from the same location what would become the type specimen. It was recognised as a new species well before a name was published for it, and was referred to in the interim by the informal names "Banksia aff. Cuneata" and "Banksia sp. Wagin". Alex George included an entry for it under the name Banksia oligantha in the 1987 second edition of his The Banksia Book, but the formal publication of that name did not occur until the following year, when George's "New taxa and notes on Banksia L.f. (Proteaceae)" appeared. The specific epithet oligantha derives from the Greek oligo- ("few") and anthos ("flower"), in reference to the low number of flowers per flower head. The species has an uneventful nomenclatural history: it has no synonyms, and no subspecies or varieties have been published. Infrageneric placement George placed B. oligantha in subgenus Isostylis because of its dome-shaped flower heads. A 1996 cladistic analysis of the genus by botanists Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges based on morphology yielded no information about the circumscription of B. subg. Isostylis or the relationships within it, so George's placement of this species was retained. George largely discarded Thiele and Ladiges' changes in his 1999 arrangement, but again B. oliganthas placement was unaffected, and the placement of B. oligantha there can be summarised as follows: Banksia B. subg. Banksia (3 sections, 11 series, 73 species, 11 subspecies, 14 varieties) B. subg. Isostylis B. ilicifolia B. oligantha B. cuneata Since 1998, American botanist Austin Mast and co-authors have been publishing results of ongoing cladistic