The Haze Family Tree: Lineage, Crosses & Descendants

"Every modern catalogue still leans on the Haze branch, whether the label says so or not."

Original Haze on its own was a difficult commercial plant. It flowered for fourteen weeks or more, grew tall and lanky, and demanded a climate that the Dutch greenhouse could only approximate. What turned Haze into the backbone of modern sativa breeding was a second wave of work: crossing it with faster, denser, more cooperative genetics, and selecting offspring that kept the aroma and effect of the parent without inheriting its agricultural awkwardness.

The first commercial generation

Several Dutch breeders are associated with this first generation of hybrids, but the figure most often named is Neville Schoenmakers, founder of The Seed Bank of Holland, who acquired some of the early Haze material and put serious work into refining it. The resulting "Neville's Haze" is often described as the most faithful Haze descendant — long flowering, tall, intensely aromatic — though still considerably more workable than the Californian original.

Around the same time, other breeders crossed Haze into Northern Lights and Skunk lines. These crosses sacrificed some of the pure sativa profile in exchange for shorter flowering windows, sturdier branches and higher yields. The trade-off proved popular, and the resulting hybrids quickly outsold their parents.

Super Silver Haze and the Cup era

In the late 1990s, Super Silver Haze — a cross of Haze with Northern Lights and Skunk — won the Cannabis Cup in three consecutive years. That winning streak did more to establish Haze as a household name than any single piece of marketing. Coffee shops across Amsterdam carried it, growers around the world tried to clone it, and seed banks competed to release their own version.

It also locked in the public idea of what a "Haze" should taste like. Super Silver Haze leaned into citrus, menthol and a sharp pine-resin top note. Plants that did not match that profile, even if they were technically closer to the original, were sometimes dismissed as off-type by a market that now had a benchmark.

The wider family

From the early 2000s onward, Haze became less a strain and more an ingredient. Some examples of how widely it has spread:

• Amnesia Haze — a citrus-forward Dutch favourite built on Haze parentage and a mix of South Asian and Jamaican genetics.
• Jack Herer — a tribute strain whose foundation is a Haze × Northern Lights × Shiva Skunk cross, blending sativa lift with indica resilience.
• Lemon Haze, Purple Haze, Blueberry Haze and dozens of similarly named hybrids — sometimes genuinely related, sometimes leaning on the name. The Haze label became valuable enough that the marketing eventually outran the genetics.

A note on naming

Because Haze became a marketing word as much as a botanical one, the modern family tree is fuzzier than it looks. Two seed banks can sell different "Original Haze" lines today, neither one demonstrably more authentic than the other. Where this archive talks about a specific descendant, we have tried to use names that have a relatively settled meaning in serious breeding circles.

Where to go next

For the cultural arc of how Haze travelled from California to the world, read The History of Haze. For the people behind the work, People Who Shaped Haze.