Science: Patented Peach

On May 23, 1930 President Hoover honored the late Luther Burbank by approving a bill which gave the creators of new plants monopoly rights by patent. Mrs. Burbank would presumably be rich now had the plant patent law been passed during her husband's lifetime of fruit & flower invention.

First patentee of a plant was Henry F. Rosenberg of New Brunswick, N. J. He made the "Dr. Van Fleet," a climbing rose which blooms once a year, an "ever- blooming . . . climbing or trailing rose," in the words of his patent. The rose's name is "New Dawn."

Last week President Edgar Winfred Stark of Stark Bros. Nurseries & Orchards Co., Louisiana. Mo.,* flourished the papers which gave him the first patent in the world on a fruit tree. It covers his Hal-Berta giant peach tree. The Hal-Berta, President Stark excitedly sets forth, "bears uniformly large, rosy-cheeked, delicious to eat, yellow-fleshed, freestone peaches, many of them weighing more than a pound, ripening a few days after the Hale-Elberta [peach] season when a truly high quality peach such as the Hal-Berta Giant will mean profit to the man who grows them and pleasure to the folks who eat them."