LEGO® IDEAS 21353 Botanical Garden Revealed

Plants are blooming for LEGO® Enthusiasts: since the introduction of the Botanical Range back in 2020, we have seen the arrival of 14 ICONs botanicals sets, 6 creator sets and two gifts with purchase. We have seen the 1000 piece LEGO Friends Botanical Garden, a set that was for many adults, their first Friends set.

Today, the LEGO Group unveiled 21353 – The LEGO Ideas Botanical Gardens. With 3792 pieces, this set has 12 unique minifigures. It has four birds, a dog, a frog, a bunny and a squirrel. It is two baseplates wide, 64 bricks wide, and it contains over 35 brick built species of plants. It will go on sale on November 4th (November 1 for LEGO Insiders), at LEGO Branded retail outlets, priced at $AUD499.99/ €329.99 / £289.99 / $USD329.99 / 429.99 CAD

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71462 LEGO Super Mario Piranha Plant Revealed

Every year, around this time, we see an adult focussed set drawing inspiration from LEGO Super Mario: be it the Retro TV, the Mario 64 Question Mark Cube or the Mighty Bowser. These sets have drawn heavily on nostalgic aspects of the Super Mario games, to present an artefact that has certainly been a talking point in many households around the wolrd. Each of these sets has had a suitably impressive price tag attached, too (priced from 300-400AUD This year, perhaps as a sign of the times, with cost of living being what it has become in 2023, the scale has been somewhat reduced. This year’s adult focussed LEGO Super Mario set is a shelf sized model of the Pirhana Plant. With 540 pieces, the set will be released on November 6th and priced at $AUD94.99/$USD59.99 / €64.99 / £57.99.

Over recent years, the LEGO Group have been responsive to the cries of adult fans – Give us more, give us bigger – and now it has become apparent that the major problems that these large LEGO sets have give AFOLS are related to two major factors:

  • one is cost with the previous adult focussed Super Mario sets, we have seen prices starting at $USD199.99
  • another is display space. I love the look of the new Concorde, but at over 1m in length, there is no doubt that I have nowhere to reasonably build it or display it without causing major disruption to the family living spaces.
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