US Plant Patent PP4340
Euonymus plant
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired January 9, 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
- PP4340
- Filed
- January 9, 1978
- Granted
- December 5, 1978
- Expires
- January 9, 1998
- Assignee
- DUGAN NURSERIES INC
- Inventor
- NIELSEN PETER R
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 new cultivar Sunspot is especially characterized by its broadleaf evergreen foliage which has pronounced yellow centers with dark green margins of irregular depth, with the leaves inside the plant being of the same variegated color as the stem tips, thereby giving the plant as a whole a distinctive and striking yellow spotted appearance.
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 cultivar of Euonymus fortunei, known by the cultivar name Sunspot, and characterized particularly as to uniqueness by the combined characteristics of rounded, compact and shapely habit of growth; good winter hardiness, and thick broadleaf evergreen foliage having pronounced yellow centers with dark green margins of irregular depth, with the leaves inside the plant being of the same variegated color as the stem tips, thereby giving the plant as a whole a distinctive and striking yellow spotted appearance.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4340 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.