The English cleric Rev. William Herbert established the genus Nerine in 1820 when he described N. rosea (now N. sarniensis) in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, naming it for Nerine, a guardian sea nymph sent by the Roman goddess Venus to rescue Vasco da Gama's armada en route to India.

The first collection of subsp. bowdenii was made by the South African amateur botanist, Ernest Galpin, who found it in June 1894, northeast of Queenstown, in the central Eastern Cape. A second collection was made in about 1898 by Athelstan H. Cornish-Bowden (1871–1942), an Englishman who served as Surveyor-General of the Cape Colony. His material is thought to have been collected in the vicinity of King William’s Town, in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape, but its precise location, was unfortunately not recorded. He sent bulbs to his mother in South Devon in the United Kingdom, where they flowered, and she distributed bulbs to various growers, including the nurserymen Veitch & Son of Exeter, and Kew Gardens. Having seen flowering material of the bulbs at Kew, the English horticulturist and botanist William Watson described the species in 1904 in the November edition of The Gardeners’ Chronicle, naming it in tribute to Athelstan Cornish-Bowden.

Numerous variants of this subspecies have arisen in cultivation, particularly in the United Kingdom, many of which have acquired cultivar names, and it has also been used in hybridisation programmes with the winter-growing N. sarniensis. Amongst the few habitat collections made of this subspecies during the latter part of the 20th century, is one made in June 1980, by the then Kirstenbosch horticulturist Koos Roux, who found it between Kokstad and Harding, in southern KwaZulu-Natal. Plants of this collection continue to be grown in the bulb nursery at Kirstenbosch.

The earliest collections of subsp. wellsii were made by Bayer & McClean in 1926 and by Humbert in 1934 at Mont-aux-Sources, in the northern KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg. In the late 1940’s, material from the same area was collected by Dr Arthur Quinton Wells, a resident of Oxfordshire, who introduced the plant into England. The nerine enthusiast and amateur botanist, Tony Norris, correctly considered the northern Drakensberg plants to be morphologically distinct from the Eastern Cape ones, and to warrant status as a subspecies, and in 1974 he published the name Nerine bowdenii subsp. wellsii for these plants. Unfortunately he did not designate any type material along with his description, and the name was thus invalid, however, in a recent paper in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the name has been validated (Duncan 2014).

Nerine is a genus of 23 species endemic to the southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. It is represented in all provinces of South Africa, and concentrated in the eastern summer-rainfall zone, especially the Eastern Cape. Other noteworthy members include the sparkling red or pink N. sarniensis from the Western Cape mountains, renowned for its long-lived cut flowers, the pink N. humilis, another Western Cape member noted for its massed autumn displays following summer bush fires, and the grass-leafed, bright pink N. filifolia from the Eastern Cape, one of the most easily cultivated species. N. bowdenii superficially resembles N. ridleyi in its large pink flower heads with declinate stamens and style, but the latter is a winter-growing species with broader, grey-green leaves, and native to the Hex River-, Franschhoek- and Wemmershoek Mountains of the southwestern Cape.