The species was first formally described by the nineteenth century English botanist, Joseph Hooker, in William Jackson Hooker's London Journal of Botany in 1847, from specimens collected by the colonial botanist Ronald Campbell Gunn from Mount Wellington and Lake Echo. The specific epithet (urnigera) comes from the Latin urna, meaning urn and gero, meaning to bear. It relates to the distinctive urn shaped buds and seed capsules.