Review – 40524 Sunflowers

With my colour skin, I could play hide and seek in a Reflex paper factory and never be found again. That is to say, I’m not a huge fan of the Sun. But I am a huge fan of Sunflowers, and they love the Sun. So we make a match made in heaven.

I was fortunate to get an early release set of the LEGO Sunflowers set (40524) to review. Although initially hesitant to pick up the original Flower Bouquet (10280), once we got it, we really loved how it popped on the dining table. And thus, like many fellow LEGO AFOL’s the journey down the rabbit hole of collecting the rest of a theme began.

But back to the Sunflowers. The set is quite small and similar to the Roses and Tulips. It comes with two separate sunflowers to build. As soon as I opened the cardboard box, I was pleased with the look of the sunflowers, but dreading the repetitive nature of the petals. What can I say, I have a short attention span.. There are three small bags for the pieces.

The initial part of the build is the outer petals or ray florets as they’re known after you google them. It’s a bit tedious given there are 48 petals in total. But, like all good LEGO fans, I persevered through the pain. It could always be worse. They could have made me put stickers on each petal.

Without the inner petals (disk florets), it reminds me of a windmill, and would certainly suit a MOC once a centre cap is added. The next step of the build is to add the inner petals and adding them turns the windmill into a sunflower. It’s the first time I’ve seen the plant plates in this colour and a brick link search shows a sad minifig, so these look to be a new colour for this part. They look great.

We then move on to the stems and leaves. It’s a very quick build with one having 4 leaves and the other 2. One stem is straight and the other has a slight kink into it to simulate the sunflower looking for the Sun. It would have been nice to have an adjustable head behind the flower so the Sunflower could “track” the Sun like in real life, but it’s a very minor ask. The build itself is quite quick with a total build time of around 20 minutes if you’re taking it easy.

When googling the flower parts I came across an image of the sunflower which showed a different colour within the disk florets so played around a little with a few additional parts. Let me know if you prefer any of the alternatives. I quite like the one with the dartboard, but notwithstanding, you can see the LEGO designer has done a fantastic job on this set.

Once you’ve finished the build, you just need to work out where you can put your new creations. They look great outdoors.

And also in within your existing botanical sets. Our vase probably needs a bit of a reshuffle but as they say “ain’t nobody got time for that”.

A special thanks to the LEGO Group and Perth LUG for providing this set. I hope you enjoyed the review. If you’d like more content similar to this, you can check out Casa de Bricks where Oscar and I write more about our love for LEGO.

Words by Adam Gardner

Pictures by Adam Gardner