field drawings of Proteaceae, the original field sketch of B. ilicifolia was destroyed in a Hofburg fire in 1945. A painting based on the drawing survives, however, at the Natural History Museum in London. Brown eventually published the species in his 1810 work On the natural order of plants called Proteaceae. The specific name is derived from the Latin words ilex "holly" and folium "leaf", hence "holly-leaved". In 1810, Brown published Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen in which he arranged the genus into two unranked groups. B. ilicifolia was placed alone in Isostylis because of its unusual dome-shaped inflorescences. All other species were placed in Banksia verae, the "true banksias", because they have the elongate flower spike then considered characteristic of Banksia. The shrubby, coastal ecotype was published as a separate species Banksia aquifolium by John Lindley in his 1840 A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony, but this is now regarded as a taxonomic synonym of B. ilicifolia. A specimen collected by Ludwig Preiss on 13 April 1839 from coastal sands in Perth was described as Banksia ilicifolia var integrifolia in Bentham's Flora Australiensis in 1870, but has not been recognised since. B. ilicifolia is variable in form, although the variations are not consistent enough to warrant recognising infraspecific taxa. Adult leaf margins can be entire or serrate (like holly), and can both be present on the one plant. Populations from the south coast have larger flowers and leaves, but some trees in the north of the range also have large flowers and leaves. 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 candolleana. 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 The unranked group Isostylis, with its one species, was reclassified as a section in the 1856 arrangement of Carl Meissner, and 1870 arrangement of George Bentham. In his 1981 revision of the genus, Alex George reclassified the group as a subgenus—Banksia subg. Isostylis—defined by the dome-shaped flower heads, with B. ilicifolia joined by newly described species B. cuneata and