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The Patent Garden

US Plant Patent PP7222

Magnificent Magenta Maple

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Patent expired September 6, 2008. 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
PP7222
Filed
September 6, 1988
Granted
April 24, 1990
Expires
September 6, 2008

No cultivar name of record

This patent does not name the plant. Through the 1980s and early 1990s that was still common: naming every new cultivar only became standard practice as plants began to be marketed under brand names. The grant identifies this one by its number and by a written description instead.

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

This invention is of a new and unique variety of Acer rubrum, the red maple or swamp maple, which I have now named `Magnificent Magenta.` I discovered the parent tree, a member of Acer rubrum, growing at the end of a cultivated boundary line row of trees along the eastern property line of a residence in Wathena, Kans. The tree is monecious, has leaves of widely varied size and shape, a rounded crown, and an unusual and attractive fall coloration which is long lasting before leaf fall.

Show the legal claimThe single numbered claim as granted — the legal text that defines what this patent covers.

I claim: 1. A new and unique variety of red maple, Acer rubrum, as described and illustrated, being particularly distinguished as to novelty by a combination of the shape of the tree which exhibits a desirable well-shaped, compact, symmetrical oval crown in contrast to the species which is often loosely shaped and much less compact, and a brillant, true magenta fall leaf color quite unlike that of other members of the species and any patented variety; the vivid magenta exhibited during most of the fall leaf color period dictates the name I have chosen for this tree: `Magnificent Magenta Maple.`

Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP7222 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.