Protea montana was first scientifically collected at elevation by the German plant collector and horticulturalist Johann Franz Drège in August 1829, when he was exploring the eastern flanks of the Groot Swartberg Mountains with Karl Zeyher in the area of the farm of Vrolykheid. When he returned to Europe from Africa, he detailed his botanical adventures in his 1843 work Zwei pflanzengeographische Documente, which detailed where he collected what each month in a brief diary-like format. This work is the first in which the name P. montana was published. In an index appended to the back of the book, Drège attributes the name to Ernst Heinrich Friedrich Meyer, but aside from this, nothing else is published about it, thus the name was officially an invalid nomen nudum. This situation was rectified by the Swiss taxonomist Carl Meissner in 1856, when he validated the name with a formal species description in the Prodromus book series of botanical taxonomy begun by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle.