US Plant Patent PP4237
Apricot tree
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired April 11, 1995. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.
Twenty years from the filing date would end on July 28, 1996, but this patent ends 474 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
- PP4237
- Filed
- July 28, 1976
- Granted
- April 11, 1978
- Expires
- April 11, 1995
- Inventor
- ZAIGER CHRIS FLOYD
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 variety of apricot tree which has dwarf characteristics, close leaf nodes, short heavy branches, stocky trunk, and bears yellow flesh, freestone fruit. The tree height being approximately 30% of a normal apricot tree.
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, as illustrated and described, characterized by its dwarf size, averaging approximately four feet in height in four years and reaching a mature height of 6 to 8 feet, its leaf nodes being approximately 1/2 inch apart on the new variety as compared to 7/8 of an inch on the standard apricot variety Tilton, and the new apricot variety is further characterized by the productive bearing of medium size fruit of good quality and firmness.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4237 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.