(SeattleTimes) - Jill Lane, master grower at Sky High Gardens on Seattle’s Harbor Island, uncaps jar after jar of golf-ball-size marijuana buds and allows her guests sniffs of Bubblicious, Super Silver Goo and Green Crack.

“What kind of high is that?” asks Louise Avery, gesturing to one of the jars.

“This is for daytime: taking a hike. Beach volleyball,” explains Lane to the group of visitors with Kush Tourism, a Seattle-based cannabis company. Lane continues describing strains as if the visitors surrounding the table were middle-age women in a Yankee Candle store.

Chocolate heaven, she tells the group, is “earthy and dank.” Seattle Haze is subtle: “If you have a joint in your purse or pocket, you’re not going to announce it to the world.” Dutch Treat “almost smells like B.O. … like somebody forgot to shower.”

Avery, a concierge at a downtown Seattle hotel, was one of three people the tour company took to Sky High Gardens that recent day. The others were Alaskans Zach Craft and Conrad Schwartz, who are considering starting a marijuana business when commercial-marijuana sales begin there.

Since legalization, this state’s pot industry has dreamed of vineyard-like tours at pot farms in the rolling hills of Eastern Washington and cannabis lounges where visitors and locals commune over marijuana vapor wafting through the air.

But hotels have been hesitant to tout themselves as pot-friendly, visitors have few legal locations to consume and only a few tourism companies are operating.

As much as the industry hopes the scene at Sky High Gardens is a harbinger of tourism to come, it could just as well be a mirage.

Viable attraction?

Last summer, tourists made up much of the recreational market. Step into a pot store and you’d find wide-eyed Canadians in line before a Blue Jays game or mystified Midwesterners buying a couple grams just because they could.

Will outside interest in legal pot wear off with time? Are people coming to Seattle specifically for marijuana or just curious while they’re here?

Those are the questions David Blandford, the vice president of communications for Visit Seattle, wants answered. He said the tourism-promotion nonprofit is open-minded about pot and will see if tourists flock to shops this summer or if “the novelty has worn off” before considering a marijuana promotion or advertising effort.

“We don’t have the same data that we have about wine tourism, or LGBT tourism,” said Blandford. “Nor are we able to detect that there’s this untapped market.”

Blandford said legal ambiguity between state and federal governments on marijuana makes it “hard to know what we can promote and advertise.”

Seattle hotels are taking a similar stance.

“We as an industry haven’t figured out how to deal or get on board with marijuana tourism,” said David Watkins, president of the Seattle Hotel Association. “As far as marijuana goes, it’s just wait and see.”