Here’s an image of a field of ganja being destroyed in Tripura state in Northeast India in December, 2014. The farmers have used a compact ganja landrace which they’ve clipped and planted like tea bushes – tea being a common crop in Northeast India.
Compact semidwarf plants such as this are not what most cannabis aficionados associate with the tropics. The landraces of the tropics – classic ‘Sativas’ such as Thai types – are typically understood to be not just narrow-leafleted but tall – e.g., 2 to 4 metres.
But compact and narrow-leafleted landraces are also cultivated for ganja production in the Terai region of Nepal, between the Himalaya mountains and the plains of northern India.
Because of their semidwarf architecture, such landraces don’t fit neatly into the formal taxonomy for Indicas and Sativas proposed by Small and McPartland either.
We collected an accession of this semidwarf ganja landrace type in Nepal in 2022 and can list it at The Real Seed Company site if people are interested.
Semidwarf Nepali ganja landrace (foreground only)
The image above shows a plant from this Nepali accession in the foreground (background are other landraces). To be clear, this compact architecture is uniform across the population of this landrace.
