If there’s one thing I dread building with LEGO, it’s trees – but can a set that’s pretty much just a tree change my mind?
That’s the premise with which I went into building 21365 Love Birds, one of the most affordable regular LEGO Ideas sets in recent memory. Clocking in at £44.99 / $49.99 / €49.99 for 750 pieces, this is great value on paper and absolutely looks the part, too. The only sticking point? Building the thing. At least if you’re me.
And you’re not, but I am, and if there’s one thing I really don’t like building in LEGO it’s trees. (If there are two things, it’s anything to do with string. But that’s a story for another time.) They’re often fiddly to assemble, repetitive in both technique and part selection, and arranging their leaves is probably one of the trickiest things to communicate in LEGO instructions. Or it must be given how tricky they are to decipher, anyway.
Of course, the foil to this complaint is that most LEGO trees in 18+ sets look incredible. Those in 10316 The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell and 21338 A-Frame Cabin spring to mind as great examples of wonderfully-realised trees that look convincing without succumbing to the absolutely dense parts overload (and truly intense building experience) of many of the equally-fantastic trees cooked up by the fan community.
So even if I don’t much like the journey, the destination is often – although not always – worth it. But in Rivendell and the A-Frame Cabin, the trees are mostly just a decorative sideshow to the main event. There’s plenty of other, far more interesting, stuff to build at the same time. Not so with 21365 Love Birds: only the final bag is dedicated to its coral-coloured animals, while the rest of the set is all about that tree.
That offers up a slightly different proposition right from the off. While I persevered through the trees in Rivendell and the A-Frame Cabin because I knew they were just a small part of a bigger picture – in both cases, one that’s earned a permanent space on display in my office – here I was cutting my teeth on a set that was almost nothing but tree.
But hey: I have an open mind for LEGO sets. Maybe this would be the tree to change it?
Building LEGO Love Birds
Things kicked off pretty reasonably. First I constructed a pillar of brackets that acted as the central core to the tree, which made a nice change and set the tone for what was to come: a bigger, beefier and sturdier tree than almost any I’d built before.
But it didn’t take long before I was bogged down in a sea of brown and slightly-darker-brown plates and slopes, bulking out the rest of the tree with sub-assemblies that just weren’t that interesting to put together. Concentration was key in these stages, partly for distinguishing shades of brown, and partly for attaching those sub-assemblies in just the right place – it would have been easy to pop some of them a stud out of place.
Now, I’m all for customising LEGO sets and going off-piste with builds, but that first time out of the box I really do my level best to assemble any model exactly as pictured. Call it a personality quirk and you’re probably being too kind. Anyway, you can probably see why I struggle so much with trees. And before we even reached the branches here, my eye was already twitching.
From the paper instructions alone, figuring out exactly how to position the various tail and elephant trunk pieces (as they’re so called on LEGO.com) that wrap around the tree’s trunk was… not the most fun I’ve ever had. I still don’t know if I got it spot on and that rankles ever so slightly. It shouldn’t, this is LEGO and it’s a tree and nature is not perfect or robotic, but there you go. I don’t know what to tell you.
Fortunately, it was quickly on to other things. Unfortunately, those things involved 21365 Love Birds’ 16 brown plant stalks, 22 sand green leaf limb pieces, 78 spring yellowish green plant elements, and 82 white 1x1 flowers. Yep, I’d reached the bit that in any other set would have felt like the entire experience grinding to a halt. And here… well, it also felt like that. But maybe not as much as I’d expected.
I knew I still had the birds themselves to build, and with only one bag left to open it was pretty clear by then that they’d be a closer to the set rather than a focal point. But whether it was because I was otherwise in the tree endgame, or because pretty much the whole point of this set was to build a tree, I managed to enter a sort of flow state with these leaves and branches.
As with most ‘2x’ (or greater) LEGO sub-assemblies, I built each step in tandem rather than going through the entire thing and then restarting, and with only slight variations in leaf layouts I was able to switch off my brain to a degree and just pop these pieces together. I’m still not a fan of putting anything on to LEGO plant stalks – it’s the fiddliest thing you can do with LEGO, and you can quote me on that – but it all felt at least a little bit more satisfying than I’d anticipated going into it.
And, like those great LEGO trees of Rivendell before it, the end result was absolutely (and quite obviously) worth it. This is perhaps the single most impressive tree the LEGO Group has ever cooked up, although that’s not really a surprise when it’s pretty much the entire point of the set.
The birds look nice even if they’re an original creation – rather than being based on any particular species – and the coral pops against the browns and greens of the tree, but when so much of the build is devoted to the tree they were inevitably going to take a backseat. And yet… as good as the tree looks, it’s actually a bit odd without them.
The horizontal platform at the top of the tree creates a perfect space for the birds to fill, but take them away and the shape of what remains doesn’t quite look natural. “But Chris,” I hear you say, “why would you want to remove the love birds from a set called 21365 Love Birds?” Fair question, but it was a point of curiosity for me and, honestly, the secondary reason for building this set at all.
What I wanted to know was how well this tree would scale with minifigures. Could you pop it in a LEGO city or medieval layout as is and not have it stick out like a sore thumb? Would it be too big? Too detailed? Let’s find out…
How does LEGO Ideas 21365 Love Birds look with minifigures?
I tried out four different scenarios for 21365 Love Birds with minifigures. First up was a regular modern-day civilian who’s just out for a walk in the woods with her camera, indulging in some nature photography. Here she’s stumbled across a giant tree that’s definitely worth snapping, because… well, it looks almost too big, doesn’t it? Just that little bit out of scale. Shame.
I wasn’t necessarily expecting better results with the next couple of minifigures I grabbed, but Series 20’s Tournament Knight and Series 29’s Unicorn Elf do actually fit a little bit better with the tree in my book, especially if you lean into the fantasy element of a medieval setting. (And you sort of have to with a unicorn in tow.) You can imagine this giant tree acting as a focal point for a kingdom.
In that spirit, I plucked Gandalf and Frodo atop their fireworks cart from 10354 The Lord of the Rings: The Shire and placed them under the tree. And even if it’s only with the slightly lacklustre trees from the Middle-earth set fresh in mind, I think this is the best fit for 21365 Love Birds. The question now is… can you use the pieces from this set alone to improve the trees in the Shire?
Come back another time for the answer to that question. For now I’ll answer the one that headlines this story, and say that while I’m not necessarily going to be rushing out to build every LEGO tree I can get my hands on, 21365 Love Birds has at least given me a better appreciation for the process. Next time I encounter a large brick-built tree in a LEGO set, I’ll think back to this set – hopefully with some fondness.
LEGO Ideas 21365 Love Birds is available now at LEGO.com for £44.99 / $49.99 / €49.99.
This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.
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