As far as patents go the Plant Patent is probably one of the hardest to enforce. Think about it your neighbor has a brand new patented plant in his yard that is both beautiful and pest free. He brags to you about how nice it looks in his yard and how much he spent on it. He tells you that he paid so much for it because it is a ‘patented plant’ that is not available anywhere else.
You start remembering all the time you spent at your grandparent’s house as a kid and how your grandfather showed you plant propagation skills because he thought you would need to know them. You sneak over to your neighbor’s house in the middle of the night to make a few unnoticeable cuts on his plant, and the next growing season you are planting twenty of these beautiful ‘patented plants’ in your yard.
Did you infringe on the inventor’s rights? Yes!
Are you going to get in trouble for it? Slim chance! How would the inventor ever know?
I am not down-playing the value of a plant patent , I believe that hard working horticulturists should be able to recover money for the pain-staking time spent finding, developing and propagating new breeds of plants. I was just using the above analogy to point out the ease at which a Plant Patent could be infringed upon. Now imagine if a nurseryman (one who grows plants for a living) wanted to propagate this plant, he could do thousands in the same amount of time that it took you to do 20.
While my grandfather did not teach me plant propagation (it is a skill I learned while working as a research assistant in horticulture at Auburn University), I do believe that he would roll over in his grave if he knew people would pay $50 or more for an azalea, which is one of the easiest plants to propagate.
Check out the link below for some beautiful azaleas. The picture above is Encore Azalea 'twist'.
