US Plant Patent PP4372
Apple tree
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired February 21, 1998. 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
- PP4372
- Filed
- February 21, 1978
- Granted
- January 30, 1979
- Expires
- February 21, 1998
- Inventor
- CRAIG DONALD E
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
The subject apple tree comprises a new Red Delicious variety originating as a sport limb on an Oregon Spur variety tree, U.S. Plant Pat. No. 2,816. The new variety is of the spur type. Its fruit colors approximately two weeks earlier and ripens approximately one week earlier than does the fruit of its parent.
Show the legal claimThe single numbered claim as granted — the legal text that defines what this patent covers.
Having thus described this new and distinct variety of apple tree, I claim: 1. The new and distinct variety of apple tree characterized particularly, as contrasted with its parent Oregon Spur, by the ten to fourteen day earlier coloring of its fruit; by the approximately one week earlier ripening of its fruit; and by the stripes of light color underlying the deep and intense overall red color of its fully ripened fruit, substantially as shown and described.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4372 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.