Associative property of cardinal adjectives

Would you say, e.g., 'ten fingers and toes' to convey ten of each, or 'twenty fingers and toes' to convey their total?

Does the implied number change if the items are not analogous (e.g., 'fingers and toes'), but instead wholly unrelated (e.g., 'fingers and flowers')?

I did look at an ngram of the two phrases in my first example, but it doesn’t seem so clear cut—and a quick sampling of the corpus does not necessarily reflect proper grammatical usage, which is what I would like to understand.

And, yes, I realize saying 'ten fingers and ten toes' would improve clarity.

Solution 1:

Ten fingers and ten toes

is the best solution.

There is no clear answer to a lesser solution because it would be subject to the assumptions a particular reader might make.

Why would you pursue a lesser solution anyway?