My wife likes flowers. Especially on special occasions. I appreciate them as well, for their fragile beauty and the way they are wonderfully made. Unfortunately, I prefer flowers if they are in the garden, for I am ashamed to say that flowers make me sneeze.

For the sake of my health, my wife very graciously, but with some sadness, throws flowers out after a few days. The compost heap benefits, but the radiant glory of colour is gone from the house. Visitors, please bring flowers. Their beauty is but short lived, and I will get over a sneezing fit.

I have often given my wife roses for our wedding anniversary. This year I wanted to give her some flowers that lasted longer than five days. So I made my own.

The astute among you will notice they are made of plastic. In fact, they are made of LEGO. Now I must confess that the design is not entirely my own. I found the construction method on Flickr, by a guy called Chris, and borrowed it. It appears it’s not his original idea either. So if it’s your original idea, please get in touch so I can credit you appropriately.

If you’re familiar with stepping on a Lego brick in the dark, you may notice the lack of studs on the bricks. The construction method is quite complex and involves curved arch bricks at all sorts of angles. No instructions exist for these roses (as far as I know). I worked out how to build them from Chris’ picture. When I showed the above photo to my colleagues, they were so fascinated by the design that I did a construction demo one lunchtime. No instructions, no plans, just the box of bits … and in a few minutes I handed a rose round the group.

Need I say that my wife was very pleased with the flowers? They stood in a jam jar on her dressing table for several months until I dismantled them to dust them. Then I rebuilt them, because they are so nice.