Legends: Skunkman Sam

The Mystic Breeder Behind Skunk No.1

Skunkman Sam is the breeder of one of the most popular modern hybrids in the last 50 years, Skunk #1. Sam started his career in cannabis as a young hippie hitchhiking across the Hippie Trail with his then girlfriend and now wife has 50 years. 

While collecting genetics along the Hippie Trail, Sam realized his true calling was to breed and preserve unique cannabis genetics from all over the world. Sam saw the potential and brought his collection back to Santa Cruz and started breeding in the early 70s. As fate would have it, one of his neighbors referred to as simply “G”, bred original Haze in 1969 and fortunately Sam saw the uniqueness of the variety and saved it.

One of Sam's other neighbors in the 1970s published a magazine simply titled, Blotter, which was for the psychedelic culture. Sam wrote one of the first really complex breakdowns of modern cannabis breeding in a contribution he titled: “Sun, Soil, Seeds & Soul” under the pen name “Selgnij”, which was his tripping nickname backwards. Legend has it that in Santa Cruz, when they were having psychedelic parties, Sam, who is over six-foot-tall with long hair, would wear a Jester's hat with bells on it and all of his friends called him “Jingles”. 

Sam created the first modern seed company called “Sacred Seeds” and started selling high quality cannabis seeds in 1975, offering varieties such as Skunk No.1, Original Haze, California Orange, Afghan #1, Durban Poison, Hindu Kush and many others. Unlike many of his peers, Sam saw the value in saving these sacred genetics and his collection went onto become the primary varieties of cannabis when he brought his collection to the Netherlands in 1985.

In 1984 a group of Dutch growers had heard legendary stories about a plant variety coming out of California that was better than anything else and they sent someone to California to get some of the seeds from Skunkman Sam. Upon returning to the Netherlands and growing some of the Skunk No.1 seeds, they quickly realized it was much better than anything else they had ever grown and immediately made him an offer to join their team, appropriately named, The Green Team. 

Around the same time another Dutchman named Nevil was starting The Holland Seed Bank, the only problem was he didn't have good genetics. In fact, Nevil started his company selling seeds that he collected from various coffee shops and sold them for as little as $0.25 each with the disclaimer that he did not grow them and did not know the true origin. That changed when Nevil met Skunkman Sam in 1984 and purchased a majority of the varieties in Sam’s seed collection. Varieties that would become mainstays in Amsterdam coffee shops for years to come, such as Skunk No.1, Skunk No.2, Hindu Kush, Afghan #1, California Orange, Durban Poison, and Haze, all came from the California mountains and Sam’s Sacred Seeds collection. 

After Sam successfully set up Nevil to become one of the most popular seed banks in the world, Sam went onto supply the other initial Dutch seed banks such as; S.S.S.C., the Super Sativa Seed Company, The Flying Dutchman, S.S.C., the Sensi Seed Club, Positronics and many others with the genetics that later made Amsterdam’s cannabis coffee shops famous. Were it not for Skunkman Sam’s seeds, specifically Skunk No.1, the entire indoor cannabis cultivation scene may have been greatly delayed, for it was the uniformity and consistency as well as quick flowering time of Skunk No.1 that made indoor cultivation possible.

As published in:
Grow Magazine, Vol.5 Issue 6
January 2021