Banksia marginata (silver banksia)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Banksia marginata, photographed by ronavery — fig. a ronavery, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-04 / obs. 203641348

Banksia marginata, photographed by stevel99 — fig. b stevel99, CC0 1.0 / obs. 194244632

Banksia marginata, photographed by Kym Nicolson — fig. c Kym Nicolson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192062915

Banksia marginata, photographed by Cowirrie — fig. d Cowirrie, CC0 1.0 / obs. 190013896

Banksia marginata, photographed by ROY — fig. e ROY, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188074732

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Banksia marginata, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Tasmania	TAS
Victoria	VIC

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 1,112 in flower of 1,379 examined

87%

90%

91%

94%

92%

90%

76%

70%

46%

33%

18%

59%

Proportion of examined Banksia marginata in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	112	129	87%	80% to 92%
Feb	146	162	90%	85% to 94%
Mar	199	218	91%	87% to 94%
Apr	221	236	94%	90% to 96%
May	138	150	92%	87% to 95%
Jun	102	113	90%	83% to 94%
Jul	45	59	76%	64% to 85%
Aug	43	61	70%	58% to 80%
Sep	24	52	46%	33% to 60%
Oct	15	46	33%	21% to 47%
Nov	10	56	18%	10% to 30%
Dec	57	97	59%	49% to 68%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Banksia marginata observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 1,112 of 1,379 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,048 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.6 °C	6.3 °C	9.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.5 °C	24.4 °C	28.4 °C
Annual rainfall	457 mm	737 mm	1,292 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	52 mm	130 mm	220 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,048 research-grade observations of Banksia marginata that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 20 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Banksia australis R.Br.
Banksia australis var. depressa (R.Br.) Hook.f.
Banksia depressa R.Br.
Banksia depressa var. subintegra Meisn.
Banksia ferrea Vent. ex Spreng.
Banksia gunnii Meisn.
Banksia hypoleuca Hoffmanns.
Banksia insularis R.Br.
Banksia integerrima Dum.Cours.
Banksia integrifolia Labill. ex Meisn.
Banksia marcescens Bonpl.
Banksia marginata var. diffusa Endl.
Banksia marginata var. humilis Meisn.
Banksia marginata var. microstachya (Cav.) Sims
Banksia marginata var. microstachya (Cav.) Sims
Banksia microstachya Cav.
Banksia microstachya var. marginata (Cav.) Domin
Banksia patula R.Br.
Banksia praemorsa hort. ex Dum.Cours.
Sirmuellera microstachya Kuntze

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.