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.

In Hermann Otto Sleumer's 1984 monograph on the Neotropical species of Schoepfia he writes that it can exceptionally grow to ten metres,[3] 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.

[3] The leaves then to be variable in shape; they have been described as lanceolate, elliptic or lanceolate-ovate, and sometimes inequilateral;[4] or obovate-oblong[3] or ovate-oblong to oblong-lanceolate,[5][3] sometimes subobovate-lanceolate.

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.

[5] 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 anthesis, only in bud.

[5][3] The epicalyx is itself composed of adnate bracts and bracteoles, welded into a cup with a very shallowly sinuously lobed and obscurely ciliated margin.

[3] Schoepfia harrisii was first collected by William Harris, a government botanist, near the village of Troy at the turn of the 19th century.

[4] Sleumer states the species can be found at altitudes of 150-915m in 1984,[3] but this may be due to confusion with a misidentified specimen of S. obovata, which was collected near the southern coast.

[1][10] It is only found in Cockpit Country, a karst landscape, a region of many steep, rounded, limestone hills, shaped like a vast egg-carton.

[7][5] An initiative taken by Daniel L. Kelly in 1988 to assess a large number of Jamaican endemic plants, according to the standards promulgated by the IUCN at the time (Davis et al., 1986), identified this species of tree as 'rare', i.e. not in danger of extinction, but at risk due to a restricted geographical range.