US Plant Patent PP4253
Frizzie Lizzie
Plant of the fern family
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired May 16, 1995. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.
Twenty years from the filing date would end on May 19, 1997, 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
- PP4253
- Filed
- May 19, 1977
- Granted
- May 16, 1978
- Expires
- May 16, 1995
- Inventor
- ARNOLD ELIZABETH R
Abstract
A new and distinct variety (cultivar) of fern plant of the group known commercially as "Boston ferns" has been discovered and propagated. The new cultivar originated as a vegetative variant ("bud sport") of a plant of Nephrolepis exaltata cv. Verona, and is distinguished from its parent and other cultivars of "Boston ferns" by fronds that have shorter, more numerous and crowded divisions which grow entangled with one another to produce thick matted blades, and by pinnules that have laminae which are very small, variable in shapes but predominately narrowly linear, irregularly pinnatifid or forked.
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 Boston fern substantially as herein described and characterized by a growth habit which provides specimens with repeatedly dissected leaves with short divisions and small variable pinnules and that appears as a dense fluffy dome-shaped mass of entangled leaves, and that, in comparison to Nephrolepis exaltata cv. Smithii and cv. Fantasia, has leaves which become pendant at an earlier age and which tend to continue to be bent abaxially, has divisions of the blade which so crowd into each other and into adjacent leaflets and leaves as to form a thicker, denser and fluffier mass, and has pinnules with laminae predominantly more narrowly linear, irregularly pinnatifid or dichotomously branched, the overall color of said specimens being substantially moderate yellow green.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4253 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.