Thanks JoJo! We were very curious about that one, had never seen anything like it before!

FWIW, the coloring of Crimson Pygmy barberry is quite variable. It is entirely possible that both plants are the same and just responding to differing growing conditions. For that reason, 'Concorde' is considered a superior selection, as it maintains that deep burgundy coloring consistently in all but lots of shade. Also stays more uniformly compact.

It is not Orange Rocket and I doubt any of the Sunjoy selections....which would not be easily mistaken for either Concorde or Crimson Pygmy

I suspect some in the trade have been supplying crimson pygmy (cultivar is 'Atropurpurea Nana') that are not true to type because of their weak coloring - like in your picture. (Coloring that they have from the time they come off the truck). As though inferior seedlings have been raised and dispersed under the name. Same as has happened with 'Bloodgood' Japanese maple and 'Palace Purple' heuchera in the past.

Is the well-bred crimson the purple or red/green one?

I’m assuming the lighter red one?

If there is a 'Concorde' there it is the dark one in the second shot. With the first one being like what outlets here have been presenting as 'Crimson Pymy' (correctly 'Atropurpurea Nana') in recent years. Warehouse store plant department or independent garden center, I see the same light reddish purple, partly green material.

I finally looked at the Japanese barberries at a garden center near me and as it happens they have crimson pygmy that fit the bill. As in dwarf habit and good color. Unlike all the other ones I have seen lately (past few years) that look like your first picture.

Funnily they also have a different cultivar labeled 'Atropurpurea Nana'. Similar color but with pointed branches instead of rounded. If I remember right these are both under shade cloth, yet are a strong purple.

So there we have three different cultivars on the local market during the same period of years with overlapping labeling. Showing yet again how much of a circus the labeling of nursery stock is in the US. With (I've been told) the trade publication American Nurseryman having an article some years back stating that as much as 1/3 of stock was being grown and sent out with labeling inaccuracies.

As if picking plants wasn’t hard enough for some of us without needing to worry if a plant is labeled correctly-I have multiple black walnuts as well as low-lying soggy areas, some in the shade, to consider in my garden. iPhone is always out looking up a plant I am considering to see if it would be a good fit. Thanks again everyone for your input!

Crimson Pygmy Barberry is not a stable plant. For may years nurseries have blamed each other for mixing up the plant in the trade, but we have purchased CP from many growers and found nice dense, dwarf plants, and each year we end up rouging out taller plants. Every year we find larger plants. These larger plants make more cutting wood so eventually a grower is selling the incorrect phenotype. Whole plant reversions are not common and not taught in plant science or horticulture classes. The best explanation I have gotten is that the plant has a "jumping gene" that cause the reversion. The same can be said for Annabelle hydrangea. At times it can go back to a wild-type, the entire plant and not just one branch like a typical reversion or mutation. I have never seen CP or Annabelle reversions just back to the true phenotype, so it appears to jump in one direction.

Yes, some hybrids that are widely available in nurseries are also very unstable. Years ago all my newly planted bicolor phlox reverted to its original magenta version. For a while I had two kinds of blooms going on one plant, but they were all fully reverted by the end of the growing season. So frustrating!