US Plant Patent PP4404
African violet
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired November 17, 1997. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.
No term adjustment or disclaimer is recorded against this patent, so this is the full statutory term — twenty years from the filing date.
The record
- Patent number
- PP4404
- Filed
- November 17, 1977
- Granted
- April 10, 1979
- Expires
- November 17, 1997
- Inventor
- JORGENSEN FRANK
No cultivar name of record
This patent does not name the plant, and for its era that is ordinary rather than an omission. Before about 1980, breeders frequently patented a plant without giving it a cultivar name at all — the grant identified it by its number, its parentage and a written description of the flower and foliage. Most plant patents from the 1930s to the 1970s have no name in them.
Nothing here is missing from our records: the patent itself states no name. Where one exists we show it, and we do not invent one.
Abstract
A distinct and new variety of African violet plant distinguished by its large upstanding flowers of intense pink color with petals having entire margins which form a distinctive cluster at the center of the plant rising above a generally horizontal and rotate spread of large leaves having relatively short to half-long and thick petioles having a slender conical shape at their upper ends below the leaf.
Show the legal claimThe single numbered claim as granted — the legal text that defines what this patent covers.
I claim: 1. A new variety of African violet plant, substantially as herein shown and described, characterized by the compact growth, the filled, intense pink, upright flowers which rise upwardly in a central compact cluster above a circle of leaves having on the upper side a light central star-shaped spot and being supported by heavy peduncles increasing their diameter gradually towards the leaves.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4404 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.