Schoepfia harrisii
Schoepfia harrisii is a species of flowering plant in the Schoepfiaceae family. It is a small tree or shrub, growing two to five metres tall. It is endemic to Jamaica, where it is only known to occur in the parishes of Trelawny and Clarendon, in what is known as Cockpit Country, a region of many steep, rounded, limestone hills, shaped like an egg-carton. Here it grows on crags in moist woodland, between 600 and 900m in elevation. Description 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. The leaves are up to 11.5cm in length and are usually 2-4cm broad, but usually smaller. The leaf margins are flattish. The leaves are leathery, not really tuberculate and brittle (when dry?) in texture and coloured yellowish-green to pale olive; they are rather dull in colour when dry. The midrib is somewhat raised on both sides of the leaf, and from it 3-4 pairs of lateral veins curved quite steeply towards the apex, sometimes faintly looping before they reach the margin. These veins are slightly or hardly raised on both sides. There is no vein reticulation. Schoepfia harrisii is a generally cauliflorous species, bearing most of the inflorescences on older stems, although some may incidentally appear in the leaf axils of the young, still leaved stems. There are one to two, sometimes three, glabrous inflorescences at each axil. These inflorescences are rather basic in form, consisting of a short 1-1.5cm long peduncle topped by two flowers, rarely one or three. The flower buds are rounded. The flowers have 1-2mm long pedicels and usually six petals, sometimes five. The flower (the corolla specifically) is believed to be greenish-yellow in colour, but Sleumer notes in 1984 that none of the specimens were in