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The Patent Garden

US Plant Patent PP5051

Plum tree

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Patent expired November 2, 2001. 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
PP5051
Filed
November 2, 1981
Granted
May 10, 1983
Expires
November 2, 2001
Inventor
STEPHENS BUELL K

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

A plum tree substantially identical to the Santa Rosa Plum Tree (unpatented), which it most nearly resembles, and which bears reddish-purple skinned, light yellow-fleshed, cling stone fruit, but distinguished by bearing fruit which ripens from two to three weeks earlier than the fruit of the Santa Rosa Plum Tree.

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

Having thus described and illustrated my new variety of plum tree, what is claimed as new and desired to be secured by Letters Patent is: 1. A new and distinct variety of plum tree substantially as illustrated and described, and characterized by trees, leaves, and fruit which are substantially identical to those of the Santa Rosa (unpatented) plum tree, but distinguished therefrom and characterized as to novelty by fruit which ripens from two to three weeks earlier than the Santa Rosa.

Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP5051 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.