Schoepfia harrisii

It is a small tree or large shrub, growing two to five metres tall. In Hermann Otto Sleumer's 1984 monograph on the Neotropical species of Schoepfia he writes that it can exceptionally grow to ten metres, however he may have been confusing the issue with data garnered from a specimen of S. obovata, a species which was first discovered to grow on the island in 1982, when it was found that an earlier found specimen of S. obovata had been misidentified as S. harrisii. George Proctor describes S. harrisii as a "straggling or even scrambling shrub", as opposed to a tree. The first specimen was collected by Harris from a shrub which was 15ft high. The young stems are stout, and become covered in whitish-grey cork at a young age, but the old branches are relatively slender, old branches and main stems growing a thick layer of corky bark. The leaves then to be variable in shape; they have been described as lanceolate, elliptic or lanceolate-ovate, and sometimes inequilateral; or obovate-oblong or ovate-oblong to oblong-lanceolate, sometimes subobovate-lanceolate. Although most leaves gradually taper to end in a blunt, rounded or even flat apex, they are sometimes bluntly acuminate. The base of the leaves is broadly cuneate to rounded, and then attenuates into a short petiole, 4-8mm in length and about 1.5mm wide. …

It is endemic to Jamaica, where it is only known to occur in two parishes, southernmost Trelawny and northern Clarendon, in what is known as Cockpit Country. Specifically, it occurs in scattered locations in Cockpit Country around the northwestern perimeter of the central mountains.

Sleumer states the species can be found at altitudes of 150-915m in 1984, but this may be due to confusion with a misidentified specimen of S. obovata, which was collected near the southern coast. Proctor, whose specimen it was which was misidentified, gives 'revised' altitudes of 2,000–3,000 feet (610–910 m) in 1982, which is followed by Kelly in 1998.

It is only found in Cockpit Country, a karst landscape, a region of many steep, rounded, limestone hills, shaped like a vast egg-carton. Here it grows on crags in moist woodland. It probably blooms in midwinter.