Field Flowers

Lego has a line called Botanicals, featuring beautiful flowers and stylish arrangements and also, apparently, a fistful of weeds. Okay, technically set #30701 is called "Field Flowers," but come on: these are Lego weeds. Lego's site describes this set as a "wildflower posy [...] blooming with authentic details," and that is how I just this minute learned that a "posy" is not a specific type of flower, but instead a term for a small, handheld clutch bouquet. Never knew that! I just thought they were a species: you know, roses, petunias, posies, tulips, like that. The bit I really love about this job is learning new things and getting to share them with you, the reader. Rather than being sold in a classy black box, this set is one of the small impulse-buy ones: per Rustin, those used to be called "polybags," because that's what they were sold in, but these days Lego is getting more environmentally friendly by putting them in stiff paper bags instead. So what do we call them now? You can actually find this set in both styles, depending on when your store ordered which wave: like, it was originally sold in plastic, now it's sold in paper. Same set inside both, though. The first flower in the set is the rare and elusive taraxacum. That sounds fancy, doesn't it? Sorry, it's just the real name for a standard dandelion, one of the most absolutely common plants in the world. Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as a weed, the same way there's no such thing as a tree or no such thing as a fish: there is no taxonomic category for "weed," it's just a term we use to refer to any plant that grows where we don't want it to, meaning the definition is entirely about context. Before the advent of lawn cultivation, for instance, dandelions were considered good: they were used thoughout ancient Europe and Asia for both food (the Latin name comes from the Arabic tarakhshaqun, meaning "bitter herb," and they've got more vitamin A than spinach and more vitamin C than tomatoes, plus calcium, iron, and potassium) and medicine (Middle English called them the piss-a-bed, because they're a natural diuretic, and all those vitamins they're packed with make them a good way to cure scurvy), and were even intentionally grown in gardens strictly for their looks. They're even pretty good for your lawn, if you're patient: the reason dandelions are so hard to get rid of is that they grow a long, sturdy taproot that reaches deeper into the ground year after year, and that pulls up nutrients shallower plants, like grass, would otherwise be unable to get at; meanwhile, their tenacious horizontal roots will push through even the hardest soil, loosening and aerating it for less hardy plants' use. Paradoxically, it's also lawn culture that helps dandelions thrive so well: if grass was allowed to grow to three or four inches (the size of a GI Joe or Star Wars figure) instead of being cropped short, the shade it provided would starve dandelions of their sunlight, meaning that getting mad at dandelions in your carefully manicured yard is like deliberately pouring sugar water on the floor and being mad you got ants. True dandelions can be differentiated from false dandelions by their hollow stem. This Lego version uses six green tube blocks to form the stem, though of course there have to be Technic connectors inside to hold them together. The flower head itself is made from Technic gears, in yellow, and we even get a pair of the old palm tree fronds sticking out the side to create the leaves that give the plant its English name: "dandelion" is a loanword from Old French, where it was dent-de-lioun, meaning "lion's tooth," from the leaves' sharp shape. (In modern French it's un pissenlit, which, yes, again refers to peeing the bed.) I wasn't sure what the second plant in the set was supposed to be, but I assumed it was some other ugly weed, in keeping with the theme. No! It is, in fact, a stalk of wheat. Or ear of wheat, maybe, since it's a grain the same way corn is? Is wheat a grass? Is corn a grass? Wheat may have been the first crop ever grown on a significant scale (it's either that or figs), coming out of Mesopotamia about 11,000 years ago. It had been harvested for perhaps 10,000 years before that, too, but that's when we started growing it ourselves on purpose. Basically, we just fenced off natural grasslands so grazing animals couldn't get at it, then resowed after harvesting - about as "low maintenance" as you could get back then. Harvested wheat was also incredibly easy to store for long periods of time, which is why humans became so reliant on it. Today nearly 500 million acres are dedicated to growing wheat worldwide, and 95% of that product is just one type - the common what used in regular bread and pastries - with the next-highest-yield variety being the sort used in making pasta. The top of a wheat stalk is known as the "spike," and this one's spike is made from four of what Bricklink identifies as a "minifigure crown" with matching cone pieces in between. It's the simplest build in the set, but also the tallest, thanks to four round bar pieces forming the stalk, with those being held together by golden lightsabers! The final flower is what the official copy on Lego's website refers to as a "dandelion clock," which must be some kind of weird Danish/European translation issue, because I've been American almost my entire life and I have never once heard any person at any time anywhere ever call a dandelion's second form a "clock." It's still just a dandelion. Or a dandelion puff, if you need to get ultra-specific. You blow on them to make a wish. But apparently in some cultures, instead blowing on them will tell you the time? By how many tries it takes to get to the center of a Tootise Roll Pop all the seeds free and drifting away? So that is now two things I've learned from this set: posies are a kind of bouquet, and at least one person in Lego's copywriting department thinks real human beings call dandelion puffs "clocks." This blowball is complex, but clever: at its core is a brown brick with studs on all four sides and the top. Into each face of that plugs a six-bar plant stem, like regular sets would use to make flowers. Except here it's light tan, and a clear stud with a narrow hole goes onto each end of that. Five pieces, six stems per piece, 30 little clear pieces you need to carefully plug in. You have to line them up just so, in order for the pieces to not knock into each other, but it really does look great once you do, very realistic (as far as Legos go). This one only gets three bars for the main stem, compared to the wheat's four, but that also means we get two mint green lightsaber hilts. Dandelions are like pigeons: once a respected and cultivated species, they became a "nuisance" the instant we decided we didn't need them anymore. But wheat? Wheat is the GOAT of staple crops. Approximately 20% of all calories eaten by humans worldwide every day come from wheat alone! It's a bit confusing to put two weeds and one dietary necessity in the same set, but there's no denying that Lego has re-created all three of them in nicely recognizable form. If you've been considering giving the Botanicals a try, this 77-piece polybag is a fine introduction. -- 05/14/26