This will be a numbers game. How many times will each flower fall apart during construction? How many times do the leaves fall of when putting it in a vase? And how many times do we see the ‘x’ in the instruction manual for the lovely 10342 Pretty Pink Flower Bouquet (AU$99.99/£54.99/US$59.99/€59.99) ? The LEGO Group kindly provided this set for review, but all opinions are our own.
The first flower bouquet release surprised me with how different and fresh it was. Since then four bouquets have been released; Roses, Wildflower, Flower and now Pretty Pink. Incidentally they are all still available for purchase at time of writing (please consider the referral links provided here). One key aspect of these bouquets is that like a regular flower bouquet, they do not come with a vase which means you tend to get more flower for your money than with some of the rounded botanical sets.
Follow us to explore what this bouquet offers, and if the numbers stack up at the end of our short counting journey.
The Packaging
The box for the 10342 Pretty Pink Flower Bouquet comes with space on the side to put a little message, akin to what we’ve seen in some of the smaller zodiac sets. This is clearly intended when gifting the set, positioning this as an alternative to giving someone a conventional bouquet of flowers.
The contents of the box surprised me with six plastic, bags. It shows how far the transition to paper bags has come that I am surprised to see plastic bags, rather than the other way around.
How many new parts?
When the first flower bouquet came out it caused a lot of excitement because parts were used in unusual ways or released in unusual colours and suddenly available in large quantities! At time of writing only 525 parts out of the 749 in this set are listed on the LEGO customer service website. This is an indication that 224 of the parts have not previously been released in a LEGO set. This could be either a new colour, or an entirely new part. This means 30% of the parts in this set are new, which is an impressive amount!
See the picture below for a quick graphical summary of the parts that appear to be new, circled in yellow, a few very plant themed custom parts in green, and a few arrows to parts that have rarely appeared before (or only this year). If you’re into new parts this set will have you covered.
And below you get some sense of what the pieces look when unpacked, with a pleasing different colour theme within each bag.
There are quite a lot of specific plant pieces in this collection. This makes sense, these are flowers after all, but I find it a little disappointing. These flowers used to be a great example of creative use of parts that were not designed for flowers. It turns the onus around; how will people use these plant pieces into something different? A car using some of these pieces? Or, as the saying goes, “Any piece is a spaceship piece!”
The Build Process
With bag 1 we commence with three Cornflowers and a branch of Eucalyptus ‘Baby Blue’, a nice difference in textures and patterns where both the circles of the Eucalyptus and the white flowers dropped off their branch several times both during assembly and while moving the final branches around (more on this later).
For the next part we will build two (2x) branches of Elder, which adds a few extra shades of green and some bent branches. The building of these branches involves stacking 22 pins on top of each other. The connection of the green cherries to the flower stems was a neat surprise but immediately screamed ‘FRAGILE’ at me. I have to admit, these cherries did not come off nearly as much as I expected (but still more than once).
Following the greens we move on the pink Roses, and Blue Daisies. Both of these flowers look very nice, but this comes partially because of the use of plant-specific parts, in the core of the rose and for the entire Daisies. So it looks great but does it look LEGO? As it is a person would be able to ask the rose the old question “she loves me, she loves me not” while pulling off the petals as shown in the photo.
A quick comparison to some earlier Rose designs shows how the design have evolved over the recent years. Notice how also the leaves on the stem went from ‘pterodactyl wing’ to ‘leaf’.
The following bag bring us my favourite flowers in this bouquet, the Canterbury Bells and the Persian Buttercup.
The Canterbury Bells use a flower calyx part that I haven’t seen before and I’m intrigued to see used in other ways. It seems to look a lot like a flower but in white I can imagine this shape be put to other uses.
The Persian Buttercup is the highlight for me. The almost entirely consists of adding axe heads to a ring, that continues into the next bag with a next gradient of lighter orange. Despite the repetition the colour gradient that appears it so subtle and elegant that the resulting flower really draws the eye in, with only a singe flower specific piece in the middle. Top design!
Following on from that We come to the, almost muted, Waterlily Dahlia using no specific flower parts, but all recoloured light nougat parts, such a shields and teeth. This flower would be better suited for a game of ‘she loves me, she loves me not’, because of the larger number of leaves.
For the finale we get to build four Boat Orchids. It seems I have typed the word orchid more often in recent times than I have ever before. There orchids pop with their dark pink colour, but because the leaves are identical it doesn’t have the shape of the orchid emphasised as well as some other earlier designs.
I found it pleasing that there is a little variation in the stems connected to each of the flowers, so that you get a little height difference when displaying in a vase.
How to display, without a vase?
Once a LEGO flower bouquet if finished the next challenge arrives; how to display? Much like with regular flowers an appropriate vase needs to be selected so what better choice than one of the designs submitted to Rambling Bricks’ Create a Vase competition from 2021? The beauty of these vases is that you can adjust them to your needs or style as you like.
Since all flower bouquets are still available you might be faced with a choice which set of flowers tickles your fancy, so have a look at them together.
Note that regular flowers tend to die before getting dusty. Not so much with LEGO flowers; some of these have been out gathering dust for a while and dusting them off can be a destructive process. Because of dust I tend to display LEGO in display cabinets, but for these flowers that seems wrong somehow. What are your thoughts?
These sets are the exception of LEGO that is allowed to be displayed in regular living areas of the house (where most LEGO is contained to dedicated LEGO zones), and they provide a nice dot of colour to the house.
There is something to be said for all of these flowers, and I am keen to see how the 10345 Flower Arrangement (coming in Feb 2025) will tie in to these; will we be able to arrange these flowers together with that set easily? Can we take those flowers and add to a vase with these? Will that set a trend for LEGO designed vases to use with all our flowers?
How many times?
I noted a few times that during assembly some flowers were quite fragile so I started noting the number of times I had to reassemble flowers. This is limited to only the flower in the Pretty Pink Flower Bouquet but obviously the other flowers suffered the same fate (damn you sunflowers!). These numbers may same more about my clumsiness than about the flowers but here it is.
The Cornflowers lost their entire head 3 times and one of the white flowers 5 times. The Eucalyptus branch lost all (!) of it’s circular leaves once and I knocked a single leaf of twice. The Elder branch only lost its grapes once! but I did manage to pop off a leaf holding the flowers once too. The bigger leaves staid in place while I was handling them.
The Rose I intentionally abused by picking the petal off for the ‘she loves me’ game, but other than that only 1 leaf came off unintentionally. The Blue daisy was solid as a rock. It’s worth noting I did not prick myself on the Rose’s thorns, which felt unnatural.
The Canterbury Bells lost some bells 5 times (different sizes different times), the eggs stayed on. The Persian buttercup was surprisingly solid when finished, but I lost a 3 axe blades during construction. I popped the whole flower off the stem at some point but the petals all stayed in place! Leaves. Together. Strong.
The Waterlily Dahlia did not give much frustration, I didn’t lose any petals unintentionally but they did bend out of alignment any time I stared at the flower. Which brings me to the orchids that were quite strong when built except for the side lips that came off two times.
The main point is that these flowers are not really designed for robust play, like many other LEGO sets, there are a lot of single stud or clip connections, which is why these are aimed at builders with a decent amount of patience.
How many ‘times’ (x)
Now that we have gotten into the mood of counting we can summarise the repetition in this set. Most pages in the instruction have some multiplier (e.g. 2x) somewhere on the page indicating you need to repeat a step, like see in the photos ‘4x leaves, 2x flower’.
In these instructions there were 16 mentions of ‘2x’, 4 mentions of ‘3x’, 5 mentions of 4x, one mention of 5x and 3 mentions of 8x. Interestingly the Persian buttercup did not have these ‘repeat steps’ much, but rather ‘put these 7 pieces down in this step’.
This illustrates a bit that several of the builds were quite repetitive. Sometimes this is relaxing, sometimes it’s annoying. Consider this when building the flowers; I would suggest to take it a bit at a time (or share the experience with a friend)
The best flower
The picture says it all. Look at that beauty. This is a delight on so many levels.
The conclusion
The 10342 Pretty Pink Flower Bouquet (AU$99.99/£54.99/US$59.99/€59.99) contains 749 pieces which is pretty much in line with the previous bouquets. There are a lot of new (or recoloured) pieces and the flowers look beautiful on display. A potential downside is the lack of a vase, but since a vase is easily found I appreciate that the focus has been on the main act: the flowers.
I give this set 4 out of 5 botanical praise points as it delivers on what it promises on the box and it provides great value as a long term display.
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Until Next Time,
Play Well!