Friends

Botanical Garden

A white curved greenhouse that quietly outclasses half the adult LEGO catalog.

Brick Rated Score

4.5/5

Set 41757 · 2023

Pieces1,072

Minifigs3

Year2023

Set number41757

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The verdict

This is a Friends set wearing an Icons trench coat, and it fooled almost everyone in the best way.

You get a genuinely elegant white greenhouse full of curved walls and clever plant builds, at a part-per-price that shames sets twice the label price. The minidolls and pastel roots might make some collectors sniff, but if you can look past the box art you'll find one of the smartest builds of 2023. It won a lot of skeptics over, and I think it'll win you over too.

Best for: Adult builders who love plants and clever parts usage but don't care what theme it says on the box

The full review

What it is

Every so often a LEGO® set slips out under a theme nobody expected and quietly turns out to be one of the best things of its year. That's the Botanical Garden. On paper it's a Friends set, aimed at ages 12 and up, sitting on the shelf next to hair salons and camper vans. In practice it's a 1,072 piece white greenhouse with curved walls, arched windows in sand green, and a glass dome that lets light pour straight through it. When it was announced, the adult fan community basically did a double take, and once people actually built it the reaction was close to universal love. It's the set that made a lot of grown up collectors admit that the theme on the box tells you almost nothing about what's inside.

The catch

What makes it special isn't just the architecture, it's the plants. The designers went and recreated a shelf of real botanical oddities using existing LEGO pieces in ways that make you laugh out loud when you spot them. Recolored saxophones stand in for the hanging traps of a carnivorous Nepenthes. A punk rocker's orange mohawk becomes the spiky bloom of a bird of paradise. Spiked shoulder armor plates turn into a rafflesia, feathery minifigure trim becomes bonsai foliage, and cacti get built from recolored eggs and pumpkins. There's even a nod to the corpse flower and the orchid family. It's the kind of parts usage that makes you look at your own collection differently, and it's a genuinely educational little tour of weird plants while you build.

Who it's for

There are a couple of catches worth naming. It is a Friends set, and it comes with three minidolls, Liann, Niko and Adi, rather than classic minifigures. For some collectors that's a hard stop, and I understand it even if I think they're missing out. There's a butterfly turning function that spins four butterflies around, which is charming but leans a bit young for a build this refined. The sticker sheet is smaller than you'd expect, which is honestly a relief. And the big catch now is timing: this one retired in December 2024, so the friendly 79.99 dollar price has drifted upward on the secondary market. If you love plants, love clever engineering, and don't care whether the box says Friends or Icons, grab it while a sensible copy is still findable. If you only collect classic minifig sets and can't get past the minidolls, this probably isn't the one to break your rule for, but you'd be walking past one of the smartest builds of the year.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build is a real pleasure because it almost never repeats itself. You start on the base and the raised beds, then move into the greenhouse structure, which is where the cleverness kicks in. The walls angle and curve rather than sitting square, the roof sweeps up into that transparent dome, and you're constantly using arches, curved slopes and window panes to keep everything soft and organic. Then come the plant vignettes, each one its own little puzzle, so the pacing stays fresh right to the end. It's pitched at experienced builders and it earns that rating: interesting techniques, satisfying section changes, and very little of the mindless brick stacking that pads out a lot of larger sets.

There are no brand new molds here, and normally I'd count that against a set, but the recolor haul more than makes up for it. You get sand green window pieces and curved parts in quantities that are genuinely useful to your own building, plus those show stealing recolors: spring yellowish green saxophones, the orange mohawk, recolored armor plates, feathery trim, eggs and pumpkins all doing double duty as botany. For AFOL parts monkeys this thing is a treasure chest of pieces in colors you rarely see. At 1,072 pieces for an original 79.99 dollars, the value worked out to roughly 7.5 cents per part, which is strong for a set this detailed, and it's a big reason the community rated it so highly.

Fun facts

01Despite carrying the Friends label and a 12 plus age rating, the set was so sophisticated that reviewers openly said it could sit alongside the adult Icons range.
02The carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plants are built from two recolored LEGO saxophones in spring yellowish green.
03The plant lineup recreates real botanical oddities including the rafflesia, the corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum), the bird of paradise and members of the orchid family.
04It was released in mid 2023 and retired in December 2024, and clean copies have been climbing above the original 79.99 dollar price ever since.