Plant of the fern family

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Patent expired January 18, 1994. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.

Twenty years from the filing date would end on January 22, 1996, but this patent ends 734 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

PP4010

Filed

January 22, 1976

Granted

January 18, 1977

Expires

January 18, 1994

Inventor

BIGGERS DONALD L

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 new plant variety of the fern family has fronds that facilitate their use as fillers and background in long cut flower displays and arrangements and provides specimens during the sporophyte generation with a rosette arrangement of long, erect, robust, pinnately compound mature fronds which have curly, relatively short pinnae that are inserted in a compact arrangement on a long, erect, robust and relatively thick rachis. The rachis and stipe are heavily endowed with hairs and the stipe has a pair of longitudinally extending thin stripes which continue along the pinna insertions on the rachis and which in color are dominated by reddish orange, brown, brownish orange, orange, yellowish brown, orange yellow and/or olive brown hues.

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

I claim: 1. The new and distinct plant variety of the fern family substantially as herein described and characterized by a growth habit providing specimens during the sporophyte generation with a rosette arrangement of long, erect, robust, pinnately compound, mature fronds which have curly, relatively short pinnae that are inserted in a compact arrangement on a long, erect, robust and relatively thick rachis which is heavily endowed with hairs and basally merges with a stipe that is also heavily endowed with hairs, the stipe having a pair of longitudinally extending thin stripes which continue along the pinna insertions on the rachis and which in color are dominated during early frond maturity by reddish orange, brown, brownish orange, orange, yellowish brown, orange yellow and/or olive brown hues.

Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4010 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.