LEGO Botanicals aren’t what they used to be

LEGO Botanicals’ new sunflowers are pretty much perfect, as both a LEGO set and a revealing representation of how the theme has changed since 2021.

11502 Sunflower Bouquet is the spiritual successor to 2022’s 40524 Sunflowers, and beyond the gap in price and piece count between the two sets, there’s also a gulf in realism and authenticity. But where the new set looks a lot more like real sunflowers, it achieves that at the expense of the characteristic that made LEGO Botanicals such a runaway success in the first place.

40524 Sunflowers vs. 11502 Sunflower Bouquet

Release: Jan 1, 2022 vs. Mar 1, 2026

Price: £12.99 / $14.99 / €14.99 vs. £54.99 / $59.99 / €59.99

Pieces: 191 vs. 686

40524 Sunflowers was originally released under the Creator banner, but thanks to updated packaging for 2026 now lives under Botanicals branding. And like 40460 Roses and 40461 Tulips, it’s positioned as a more affordable taste of buildable LEGO plants – but size matters not where these sets are concerned, so while these are smaller sunflowers there are no compromises in design.

And more importantly, there are no specialist pieces doing any of the heavy lifting. The leaves on the stems are green cockpit windshields; the tips of the flowers are paddles; and the inner petals are standard LEGO leaf elements. This is the ingenuity on which LEGO Botanicals was originally built, and on which it thrived in those early years.

Fast forward to 2026 and 11502 Sunflower Bouquet completely shows up its predecessor in nearly every department. The flowers are larger and more convincing; there’s more variety in the box with three different stages of blooms, alongside two forms of eucalyptus; and they’re more satisfying and easier to assemble (more on that in a sec).

But as I touched on in my review of 11510 Magnolia Branches, these new Botanicals sets also happen to be prioritising the destination at the expense of the journey. Again, there are pockets of clever parts usages to be found in 11502 Sunflower Bouquet – see the green tubs used for the pedicels, pagoda corners that surround the closed head and the sand green shields on the eucalyptus – but they feel secondary to the main event. And in this case, the main event is a dedicated leaf element introduced in 2023.

It’s here in yellow for the first time, and it’s almost single-handedly responsible for how great the sunflowers look in this set – there are 104 included in total – but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as clever as repurposing paddles did in 40524 Sunflowers. This is a LEGO leaf element that’s been used plenty of times and in plenty of colours over the past three years, so it doesn’t feel quite as egregious as the magnolias’ two-tone petal piece, but there’s still a lingering sense of a shortcut having been taken.

There’s another telling change between these two sets that speaks to the direction LEGO Botanicals is going. 40524 Sunflowers’ inner petals are attached to the old octagonal 2x2 plate with bars element using clips, and aligning them symmetrically is pretty tough going. 11502 Sunflower Bouquet swaps that out for the relatively new version that narrows the bars to the width of a clip, so there’s no room for accidental asymmetry.

Of course, in the context of a Botanicals set asymmetry might be what you want, because it helps make the flowers appear more organic. But in pursuit of simplifying the building process the opportunity for that is lost. It’s appropriate and very much an improvement in some situations – essentially those where symmetry is the goal, in sets like 10360 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile – and does make 11502 Sunflower Bouquet a little less fiddly to assemble… but at what cost?

I’m probably coming across a little bit like Grampa Simpson here (‘old man yells at cloud’), but these two sets are a fascinating case study in the evolution of LEGO Botanicals over the past five years because they represent the same subject matter in such incredibly different ways. And as with the magnolia branches, if you prefer realism over neat part usage these will be right up your street.

They’re a good distance up mine too, because even though I didn’t find them as clever or interesting to put together as older Botanicals sets (and these are the first I’ve built in a while), there’s no arguing with the finished model. They look perfect – as they should, all things considered – and will have pride of place as a centrepiece on my dining table for a little while yet.

11502 Sunflower Bouquet launches March 1 for £54.99 / $59.99 / €59.99 and is available to pre-order now.

This LEGO set was provided by the LEGO Group for review.

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