US Plant Patent PP4080
Apricot tree
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired July 19, 1994. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.
Twenty years from the filing date would end on September 8, 1996, but this patent ends 782 days earlier — a terminal disclaimer gives term back. A source that calculates twenty years from filing would tell you this plant is still protected when it is already free.
The record
- Patent number
- PP4080
- Filed
- September 8, 1976
- Granted
- July 19, 1977
- Expires
- July 19, 1994
- Assignee
- STARK BRO 3 S NURSERIES AND OR
- Inventor
- ANDERSON FREDERIC W
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
An apricot tree which is large, vigorous, spreading, with a trunk and branches of medium size and medium texture, foliated with medium size, medium thick, cordate, abruptly pointed leaves having a glandular, coarsely serrate margin, flowering from small, medium length conic buds with medium size flowers, which have white petals and reddish sepals, in bloom two to three days after the Tilton (unpatented), and a regular and very productive bearer of small, uniform, symmetrical, oblong, freestone fruit having yellow skin and yellow flesh.
Show the legal claimThe single numbered claim as granted — the legal text that defines what this patent covers.
I claim: 1. A new and distinct variety of apricot tree, substantially as illustrated and described, which is large, vigorous, spreading, with a trunk and branches of medium size and medium texture, foliated with medium size, medium thick, cordate, abruptly pointed leaves having a glandular, coarsely serrate margin, flowering from small, medium length conic buds with medium size flowers, which have white petals and reddish sepals, in bloom two to three days after the Tilton, and a regular and very productive bearer of small, uniform, symmetrical, oblong, freestone fruit having yellow skin and yellow flesh; the variety being particularly characterized by fruit having juice with a very high sugar content, and by a stone having a sweet kernel.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4080 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.