Andre, does this mean they sold the white flower before the yellow one but put the yellow one on the box?
Good point Maureen.
I think it was like this if you compare Stefans great catalogues and booklet pictures, Gerdas homepage-poster with blue, red, white and yellow flowers from 1979 and other collectors posters and the boxes.
Before 1980 Schleich had both yellow, white, blue and red flowers for the gate and the mushroom. On both these boxes they used the yellow flower, but like with the roofcolours on the cottages they could have different colours compared to the picture on the front. The important thing is that these early flowers were always soft material.
If you look at the schleich booklet from 79 the white flower is with the mushroom playset and on other pictures it is placed with the gate. So I think you could get all colours in both playsets. My guess is that the red and blue flowers were only used for a very short time because they are so rare compared with the white.
One intresting thing is if you look at the W. Berrie catalogues from 1979 and 1980, they have the german playsets and cottages on the pictures. They have a white flower with the gate playset.
I think that before 1981 W. Berrie sold german boxes and german parts in the US. And that is the reason why you can get US boxes( with W Berrie articlenumbers) for playsets 1 to 4 printed in W. Germany and with german parts. Like on the picture of my playsets. For all these playsets I think you can find both versions, German- and Hongkong-made.
And the nice thing about this is that it could have been possible to buy a white flower in the US, but only in 1980.
But they could off course also only have used yellow flowers in these boxes.