Mountain ash tree

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Patent expired November 22, 1994. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.

Twenty years from the filing date would end on December 27, 1996, but this patent ends 766 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

PP4157

Filed

December 27, 1976

Granted

November 22, 1977

Expires

November 22, 1994

Inventor

SCHMIDT JR JOHN FRANK

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 novel mountain ash characterized by its rapid growth rate, remarkably straight trunk, and large foilage which is dark green.

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 mountain ash tree substantially as herein shown and described, characterized particularly as to novelty by a unique combination of its rapid rate of growth, a trunk which for a tree of a given height is straighter than the trunk of a tree of an ordinary variety of similar height, larger foliage with dark green leaflets, a large proportion of the surface area of young petioles and newly formed branches is reddish color, and fall changes which occur approximately 2 to 3 weeks later than similar changes in ordinary varieties.

Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4157 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.