A lily with a wrong name

A few years ago I bought a lily(one pot) at WM and it was labeled 'pixie red & white', so of course I looked it up and found nothing.....anywhere! Now I was just looking at 'lollypop' and discovered, without a doubt, it's my lily! What would have been the reason for the grower to change the name of it in the first place?

Steve

The grower just plain doesn't care and is also lazy. They still make lots of money because people buy the product anyway. Many gardeners don't care about names, they just like buying pretty flowers. But people like us who spend time on these plant specific forums discussing our favorites do care. The whole purpose of giving plants names is to give them a unique identity so we can seek and purchase them if we so choose, knowing we will get that exact plant. That is why major plant societies (lily, iris, daylily etc) set up name registers. The name registers also prevent two plants from accidentally getting the same name.

Another reason a grower might give a plant another name is that the original name is trademarked but the plant is not patented, so another grower can propagate it but not under the original name. I don't think this is the case with Lollypop. In fact, I just checked the Lily Register and found that PIXIE is a trademarked name but I don't think Lollypop is in that series. See what I mean? They don't care...

It could have been that the wrong tag was in the pot and that's all.
People pull them out to read and then return them to the wrong pot.

Thanks Pardalinum and Woodthrush for your replies. Heres a link to the growers site http://www.sipkensnurseries.com/
I found my pixie red/white in the catalogue and it has a totally wrong picture and bloom period! Also check out their "perennial" sweet peas, it shows a picture of the annual ones! Like I mentioned before, it was just a cheap WM plant from some unknown grower so I guess like you said they just don't label them right, cause they don't care.

Thanks, this has been very interesting!
Steve