Banksia baueri

Species of shrub in the family Proteaceae native to Western Australia

Banksia baueri, commonly known as the woolly banksia, is a species of shrub that is endemic to the southwest of Western Australia. It has serrated leaves and a distinctively large and hairy looking inflorescence with cream, yellow or brown flowers, and hairy fruit.

Banksia baueri grows as a many branched spreading shrub reaching high, and wide but does not form a lignotuber. Its bark is thin and grey with long fissures, while new growth is covered in fine pale brown fur. New growth occurs in summer. The leaves are usually narrow egg shaped with the narrower end towards the base, long and wide with serrated edges, tapering to a petiole long. The inflorescence develops over 5–6 months, and can reach in diameter, high and is borne on a short side branch. The flowers are cream, yellow or brown and hairy, the perianth long and the pistil long with a glabrous style. The fruit is a hairy, elliptical follicle long. It was named for the brothers Austrian botanical artists Franz and Ferdinand Bauer, Ferdinand having travelled with Brown on his 1801–05 voyage. When George Bentham published his 1870 arrangement in Flora Australiensis, he discarded Meissner's series, replacing them with four sections. B. baueri was placed in Cyrtostylis, a heterogeneous section containing 13 species that did not readily fit elsewhere. This arrangement would stand for over a century. 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 baueri. 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. It is placed alone in series Banksia series Bauerinae. In his 1981 monograph on the genus, Alex George classified it in the reinstated but much reduced series Quercinae, alongside Banksia quercifolia and B. oreophila. However he noted its follicles, which are beaked after they open, and cotyledon shape, did not fit with the other taxa and pondered an affinity with B. menziesii and B. sceptrum

Banksia baueri is found in southern Western Australia in three disjunct areas from Bremer Bay in the east to Jerdacuttup, on the south Stirling Plains, and to the northwest inland between Kweda and Tarin Rock. Plants grow in shrubland or mallee, on flat or genty sloping ground,

Its unusual flower spikes are an attractive horticultural feature. It requires well drained soil in full sun or part shade. Seeds do not require any treatment, and take 20 to 49 days to germinate.