Cultivar

A cultivar is a group of plants with common and distinct characteristics that have been bred by selection. The word «cultivar» is synonymous with «cultivated variety». The term «variety» is often used to designate a cannabis cultivar. However, the term «variety» is not strictly correct in botany, although it is used in other fields of biology.

Find out more about cultivars

«Cultivar» is a botanical term that describes plants grown to have distinct and desirable characteristics, for example, apples (Pink Lady, Fuji, etc.). On the other hand, the term variety has been adopted to describe this same concept for cannabis (Amnesia, SFV OG, Tangie, etc.). Although variety does not officially indicate taxonomic rank in botanical nomenclature, it has been adopted by convention and is widely used in both popular culture and scientific literature.

How is cannabis classified?

The classification of cannabis varieties present in the Cannabis sativa species has been the subject of considerable debate for over 500 years. One of the earliest mentions of cannabis is found in a 16th-century herbarium, a collection of labelled dried plant specimens, which describes the domesticated hemp cultivated for fiber and the wild hemp supposed to exist but never observed. Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, described all variations of cannabis as a single species in his monumental Species Plantarum in 1753. To this day, the full scientific name Cannabis sativa L. bears his name. His mention of «the plant's habitat in India» was a nod to the widespread belief that cannabis originated in this region.

French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first to propose that Cannabis was a genus made up of two distinct species, in 1785. He separated Cannabis sativa, the non-intoxicating hemp, from Cannabis indica, the intoxicating weed. It was the first time this dichotomy had been established. Irish physician William O'Shaughnessy, famous for introducing cannabis into Western medicine, declared cannabis to be a single species, but spread the use of the term indica to designate the highly intoxicating herb.

In 1924, Russian botanist Dmitri Janischevsky identified what he thought was a third species, Cannabis ruderalis. In the 1970s, Richard Evans Schultes, a leading botanist at Harvard University, proposed three distinct species of cannabis: C. sativa, C. indica, and C. ruderalis.

A drawing illustrating this interpretation was published by Harvard botanist Loran C. Anderson and widely circulated on the Internet, despite its roots in a classification that has since fallen out of favor. Canadian botanist Ernest Small refuted Schultes' three-species classification scheme and, together with renowned American botanist Arthur Cronquist, introduced a taxonomic breakdown for cannabis that has been in place since his first proposal in 1976.

Small and Cronquist's system defines cannabis as one species (C. sativa L.) with two subspecies: sativa and indica. However, even the renowned cannabis botanist Robert Connell Clarke continues to maintain that cannabis is divided into two distinct species: C. sativa and C. indica.

What's the difference between cultivar and hybrid?

Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica are botanical terms for different cultivars. In this context, a hybrid would be a cross between the two. Almost all modern cannabis is hybridized. Cannabis variety descriptions generally give percentages to indicate the proportion of sativa and indica in a strain's genetic make-up.