If you don’t know your weed history, you don’t know where you’re toking from. For the 50th anniversary of 420, we at Leafly produced five expertly reported strain family genealogies that capture most of the top 50 popular cannabis varieties on shelves today. Celebrate the iconic stoner holiday by picking up a legendary strain and […]
Legends of 420: Cannabis’ top 5 strain families
David Downs
April 19, 2021
If you don’t know your weed history, you don’t know where you’re toking from.
For the 50th anniversary of 420, we at Leay produced ve expertly reported strain family
genealogies that capture most of the top 50 popular cannabis varieties on shelves today.
Celebrate the iconic stoner holiday by picking up a legendary strain and learning how it
was created by some of the craftiest growers in the cannabis industry.
Buy these legendary strains for 420
These strain family genealogies—and the posters we made—are like CAT scans of
contemporary weed culture. If you understand how major families connect, you can
decipher the myriad new crosses and buy and smoke like a pro, with a sense of place and
time deepening your high.
This isn’t just effete, craft beer-sniffing. Cannabis is an $18.3 billion US industry that
employs 321,000 people. Trendy cultivars are million-dollar pieces of intellectual property
that make and break breeders and growers’ careers. There are thousands upon thousands
of strains, with seemingly hundreds of new ones coming out each week.
So we assembled the best cannabis journalists in the world to interview the most primary
sources, and write rst drafts of weed history that could credibly sit in the Library of
Congress. Check em out:
5 legendary strain families
An Epoch of OG: The OG
Kush family genealogy
Beyond Blue Dream: A Haze family genealogy
Citrus dynasty: A Tangie family genealogy
What is a marijuana strain family?
Weed strain families are similar to human families in a number of ways. Just like people,
cannabis comes in two sexes, male and female (mostly—like humans, cannabis can also
contain intersex genes that have led to some amazing strains, like Cherry Pie.)
Male pollen usually fertilizes female pistils, leading to offspring (seeds) that mix the
genes of both parents.
While modern humans prefer random love matches, cannabis breeders select marijuana
mates for traits they want to see in the kids, like pungent aroma and high THC potency.
Certain marijuana offspring (or “crosses” or “hybrids”) look, smell, and feel so desirable,
breeders select and cross them again and again, thus creating large families of different
strains that all contain some of the parents’ genes.
Forbidden Fruit (Matt Stangel for Leay)
The original Haze lines from 1970s, Santa Cruz, CA Haze Brothers started the Haze family
of strains that today includes Blue Dream, Super Silver Haze, Super Lemon Haze, and Jack
Herer.
Browse famous Haze
strains
Save this poster of notable Haze strain family members and friends. (Leay, 2021)
The original ‘70s Mendo Purps led to today’s Purps family that includes Granddaddy
Purple, Grape Ape, Cherry Pie, and so on.
Browse famous Purple
strains
Tap or click to open and save a big version of this poster. Happy420! (Leay)
The OG Kush family started in the mid-’90s with a mysterious Florida clone, grown in Silver
Lake, CA, that took over the state and then the world.
Browse the OG Kush
family of strains
OG Kush’s parentage is speculative, but if you like OG, try everything on this poster. (Leay)
The rst Tangie in the 2000s near Yosemite, CA strain led to an entire Tangie family with
Sour Tangie, Clementine, Mimosa, Forbidden Fruit, and Squirt.
Browse Tangie family
strains
Tap or click the image to open up and save this poster of Tangies. (Leay)
And the Cookies and Cakes family began in San Francisco in the mid-200s with Girl Scout
Cookies (aka GSC) leading to Sunset Sherbert, Gelato, Wedding Cake, Runtz, and so much
more.
Browse the Cookies and
Cakes strain family
Tap or click to open, save and print this poster. GSC origin stories abound. But the strain’s impact is not up for debate. (Leay)
Who are the people behind the trees?
Every strain you smoke started in the imagination of some loving, slightly obsessed
breeder. Like “Ooooh, I want to take the citrus in Tangie and add the dank of Cherry Pie.”
Boom—Forbidden Fruit.
Our expert journalists reached out to those breeders to get cannabis’ history direct from
their mouths, including:
Haze’s Arjan Roskam, co-founder of Green House Coffeeshop and Green House Seed
Company;
Purps’ Todd McCormick at Authentic Genetics;
Tangie’s Crockett of Crockett Family Farms;
OG Kush’s Josh “Josh D” Del Rosso;
Sunset Sherbert’s Mario “Mr. Sherbinski” Guzman;
and many, many others.
It’s hard to imagine in 2021 as legalization spreads, but these often pseudonymous
breeders faced lifetimes in prison under prohibition laws. Thank you to every breeder that
answered our DMs, picked up the phone, and shared some history and photos.
The book of cannabis—revisions expected
There’s no international body arbitrating strain claims. It’s a free-for-all, and weed
genealogists need to be private detectives.
Leay did solid work with a dedicated budget, a group of pro reporters, and a lot of time.
Still, this project confronted the limitations of time, memory, prohibition, commercial
competition, and good old-fashioned human error.
We found most strain history conicts boil down to a few factors:
Two or more breeders naming different strains the same name. For example, two
breeders sell two Grape Apes, each with different parents;
Two or more breeders, growers, or sellers naming the same strain different names. For
example, most OG Kush variants come from a few core types.
Taxonomical confusion—cannabis is full of 3, 4 and 5-way crosses, and backcrosses.
For example, GSC’s parentage is “F1 Durban” to Flo Rida OG. A lot of places just list it as
Durban. Tropicanna Cookies “F1” came from Harry Resin at Bloom Seed Co, while
Tropicanna Cookies “F2” came from Oni Seeds.
The fog of prohibition and commerce. Strain parentage gets lost—no one knows what
OG Kush’s parents are. Or today, trade secrets reign—Archive Seeds will not disclose
some parents.
We expect other weed historians to stand on our shoulders and do even better. Even then,
breeder drama springs eternal.
More strain families out there to map
This rewarding, long-overdue project got us amped to map more genealogies and empower
more shoppers in 2021 and beyond.
In the future, look out for our Skunk family genealogy. And, hopefully, deep dives into:
Afghani;
Northern Lights;
Blueberry;
Chemdog;
and all the new Cakes!
Here’s to a historic and happy 420! We hope you enjoy it.
Let us know how we did, and recommend other essential families in the comments below.
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