US Plant Patent PP4558
Rose plant
PUBLIC DOMAIN
Patent expired October 25, 1997. This plant is in the public domain — anyone may propagate and sell it.
Twenty years from the filing date would end on January 15, 1999, but this patent ends 447 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
- PP4558
- Filed
- January 15, 1979
- Granted
- July 1, 1980
- Expires
- October 25, 1997
- Inventor
- WEEKS O L
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
There is disclosed a new variety of rose plant, particularly distinguished by its unusual range of color change from light yellowish pink to dark reddish orange of newer flowers to a moderate pink to deep pink and dark reddish orange as the blooms weather and age, a frosty white overlay also then appearing, rather short, full buds with many petals, long strong stems for cut flowers with thick waxy foliage leaflets.
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 rose plant of the hybrid tea class, substantially as herein shown and described, characterized particularly as to novelty by the unique combination of a distinctly orangey-pink coloring of mature blooms which change to reddish orange as the blooms age, a white overlay appearing as the blooms age, a shorter fuller bud than the present "First Prize", the flowers being larger and more formal with medium length, strong stems, relatively few thorns and heavy, waxy foliage.
Read the full patent: US Plant Patent PP4558 in full — the complete specification, every figure, and the file history.