US Plant Patent PP4081
Nectarine 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
- PP4081
- Filed
- September 8, 1976
- Granted
- July 19, 1977
- Expires
- July 19, 1994
- Assignee
- REEDLEY NURSERY INC
- 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
A nectarine tree which is of medium size, medium vigor, spreading, foliated with large, acutely pointed, lanceolate leaves which are smooth and have a crenate margin, a regular and productive bearer of large to medium size, uniform, symmetrical, globose, freestone fruit having yellow skin substantially overspread with red, yellow flesh, and a red pit cavity with the red streaked into the flesh, and the stone having a sweet kernel.
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 nectarine tree, substantially as illustrated and described, which is of medium size, medium vigor, spreading, foliated with large, acutely pointed, lanceolate leaves which are smooth and have a crenate margin, a regular and productive bearer of large to medium size, uniform, symmetrical, globose, freestone fruit having yellow skin substantially overspread with red, yellow flesh, and a red pit cavity with the red streaked into the flesh, and the stone having a sweet kernel; the variety being particularly characterized by fruit which resembles the pollen parent, May Grand, in its attractive red skin and juicy flesh, and resembles the seed parent, Red Free, in most other respects, but ripens about one week later than said Red Free.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4081 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.