Northern Lights: six weeks, and what that made possible

At a glance

Type

Indica (as usually given)

Parent strains

an Afghani landrace × a Thai sativa landrace (as usually given)

Where and when it appeared

the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the 1970s (as usually given)

Credited to

The Indian, Neville Schoenmakers, Sensi Seeds

Flowering

6–7 weeks indoors, in the range growers usually report (as usually given)

Terpenes usually reported

myrcene, beta-caryophyllene, alpha-pinene (as usually given)

Aroma

damp earth, pine needles, hash depth, black pepper

Aroma family

pine and earth

How the character is usually described

usually described as an evening profile, noticeable weight in the body, a settled, unhurried body

Competition results

High Times Cannabis Cup 1989, High Times Cannabis Cup 1990

Also sold under

NL, Northern Lights #5

Compare it against

Granddaddy Purple, White Widow, Purple Punch

Seattle, then Amsterdam

The line was selected from Afghani seed near Seattle in the 1970s by a grower known as The Indian. Neville Schoenmakers took material to the Netherlands in 1985 and stabilised it there, and Sensi Seeds has carried the lines since the early 1990s. That chain of custody is unusually traceable for a plant of this age.

Thai material was introduced into some of the crosses during the Dutch stabilisation, which is why not every Northern Lights is equally short and equally heavy. The name covers a range rather than a single fixed plant, and the numbered selection NL#5 is the one most competition results attach to.

The 1989 and 1990 Cannabis Cup results belong to that period. They matter less as accolades than as a marker of when this plant stopped being a regional curiosity and became infrastructure for everybody else's breeding.

Why forty-five days changed the economics

About forty-five to fifty days indoors is one of the shortest blooms among the classics. Set that against the ten to eleven weeks a Haze or a Sour Diesel needs and the consequence is arithmetic: the same room produces noticeably more cycles a year.

That is the reason this plant is upstream of so much else. Breeders crossed it into long-flowering sativa lines specifically to pull the finish forward, and Super Silver Haze and Jack Herer are both direct results of that strategy.

It also explains why the name survives on menus where the plant itself is rare. A cultivar that made other cultivars possible gets remembered by name long after the shelf has moved on to its descendants.

A deliberately plain aroma

Damp earth, pine, a hash-like depth and black pepper. There is no fruit here, no dessert note, nothing candied — the entire vocabulary the last decade added to this trade is absent, and that absence is the most useful thing about it.

Myrcene leads the reported terpenes, with beta-caryophyllene and alpha-pinene behind. That is the same skeleton as White Widow, and the two are worth smelling side by side: White Widow is brighter and drier, this is deeper and closer to hash.

If you want to know what cannabis smelled like before fruit became the selling point, this is the reference. It is also the plainest possible baseline for judging whether a sweet-smelling jar is genuinely sweet or merely being sold that way.

Who it suits as a comparison

Its neighbours in this cluster are Granddaddy Purple and Purple Punch, both of which are heavier on the fruit side, and White Widow, which shares the pine-and-earth family. Against the purples, the contrast is grape and berry against earth and hash.

The character is described as an evening profile with weight in the body and a settled, unhurried feel. That description has been stable for four decades, which is worth something — though it remains a description of how people talk, not a guarantee.

Ask for something plain and earthy at a counter and this is the shape you are asking for. It is also the least likely name on this list to be attached to something it is not, because there is no marketing advantage in claiming it.

Northern Lights: common questions