The Notebook

Hello! Ellea here.

Spring is the most heavenly time of year. When the buds are coming out, colour is bursting from everywhere you look and you can feel the evenings slowly unfurling, getting longer, lighter and warmer. Total heaven.   

And longer, lighter, warmer evenings can only mean one thing – alfresco. There's nothing we love more. Honestly – we attempt to do anything and everything alfresco wherever remotely possible. Breakfast alfresco, supper alfresco – we’ve even been known to host meetings alfresco (seriously).  

So, this past weekend, fully embracing the spirit of Spring, we spent the day with our fabulous friend Elle Hollingworth (who is a both a fountain of knowledge when it comes to seasonal blooms, and an amazing floral stylist in her own right) and had a glorious day foraging for an alfreso Spring tablescape (in preparation for a small - covid friendly - supper party that evening).

The result was a gorgeously uplifting seasonal Spring table, awash with (very 100 Acres) greens and pinks. The essence of everything we love - colourful, luscious, bountiful and botanical.

The best part? You can absolutely recreate this at home. Keep reading for our (well…Elle’s) expert tips on seasonal foraging and arranging your own Spring supper tablescape.

Over to Elle...

When it comes to foraging beyond your own garden, a general tip (or more, an unspoken rule) is to only pick foliage - anything green and twiggy and evidently abundant. Be mindful of what you’re picking to ensure a) you’re not picking any protected wild flowers, and b) you’re only picking a small amount of any one thing.    

Other than that, go slow, and enjoy it! Take a blanket and some time to soak up the sunshine and the fresh, aromatic Spring air all around. There aren’t many greater pleasures in life than foraging for foliage, or lying on a blanket in the Spring sunshine.

We foraged in our local hedgerows. At this time of year - even with the season rapidly changing - there's plenty to choose from.

We used:

- Blackthorn blossom...

- Hawthorn blossom...

- Cow Parsley...

- Hazel (I love using hazel year-round, but Spring is when it's at its most beautiful – bright bevelled leaves and elegant long stems)...

...but just use whatever you can find, and love the look of. 

Flowers

I’m all about seasonal and sustainable blooms, and for the past few years have been honing my skills not just as a stylist, but a grower too, cultivating my own flowers in my Gloucestershire garden.

We used some of my best Spring stems to dot throughout the tablescape, coupling them with leafy green foliage. I love keeping it wild and true to the garden the stems came from - nothing too forced. The wilder the better.    

And, even if you don’t have much colour in your garden currently - or if space is limited - you can absolutely still find seasonal British flowers nearby - this is actually easier than you may think! I love 'Flowers from the Farm' - an amazing website that shows you where you can find seasonal and sustainable flowers from local growers, wherever you are in Britain. 

The garden-grown blooms we used were… 

- Tulips - Foxtrot Double, Mondial Double and Queen of Night 

- Cream narcissus      

- Pink flowering currant        

- Euphorbia polychrome   

And some other seasonal garden blooms you’ll find around this time of year...

-  Aquilegia

- Geums       

- Alliums    

- Lilac

But, again - use whatever you can find and like the look of!

Arranging & Styling 

As with anything going in a vase, condition your stems by removing any leaves that'll sit below the water line. Cut the stems at an angle to keep them looking fresh for days afterwards (post tablescape, these flowers populated 100 Acres HQ for at least a week). 

We spread the flowers and foliage across my collection of antique vases and jars - Ellea and I are both shameless maximalists, loving anything eclectic, colourful, wild and unkempt - and this showed through our table. To best replicate, just ensure...

a) you have lots of green, bushy foliage. In each vase, create an abundant base of interlocking green stems... 

 b) be playful with colour - fill in the foliage with the more plentiful of your flowers,  and then finish each one with a few bright, favourite stems. Our favourite showstopper stems were big double tulips, but go for anything colourful, flouncy and bountiful. 

c) most importantly - just don’t try to tame it too much. Remember - the wilder the better.!

And once you’ve filled the table with your blooms, crockery, cutlery and glasses - intersperse the gaps with 100 Acres’ gorgeous three-wick candles. They smell just as heavenly as the flowers, magnifying their beautiful scent and lighting them up with the most glorious golden glow. 

A Spring tablescape is not complete without 100 Acres candles.

Food!

You don’t need us to tell you this part. All we’ll say is…    

Wine. Where wine goes, we go. Or, if we’d had more time, we'd have made some picantes (or even some herbal cocktails with herbs picked from the garden), but we clearly spent too much time lounging in the sun...

And that’s it! There’s no set formula, no tablescape rules - just foliage, flowers, food and friends.

Above: Elle (@elleholl_at_home - left) and Ellea (co-founder of 100 Acres - right).

And that's how to forage for and create your own super easy, Spring supper tablescape. We hope you enjoyed it and would love to see any recreations too!

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Table styling and floristry by Elle Hollingworth. For more tablescapes and gorgeous images, follow us on Instagram @100_acres @elleholl_athome. 

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Hello! Ellea here. A very warm welcome to the first of our new 'Escape with 100 Acres' series. 

We’re all about escapism. We adore exploring places (the British countryside especially) - really getting to know their character and then encapsulating their glorious essence in botanical fragrance form, so that we can escape back again and again and again, wherever and whenever we feel like it. Escapism through fragrance, is what we’re here for.  

And, we really do practice what we preach. Lovers of the British countryside, we manage to escape out there most weekends (or at least, when not in lockdown).

So, we wanted to create a series to document and share our escapes with you. To divulge where we love to go and the things we love to do, in the hope of inspiring your future weekend escapades too. We’ll also often hand the mic over to some of our favourite people (mainly because we’re total travel pervs, always on the lookout for the best kept secrets) to see where they like to escape to on their weekends, both in the British countryside and beyond. Expect all things wild and wonderful, and some seriously cool hidden gems.

This first edition of our escape files, however, collides with UK lockdown 3.0, meaning it felt wrong to write about our favourite countryside stays, wild swims and meandering meadow walks when we know no one (us included) can go and actually explore them. 

So, this first edition is all about escaping…at home. It’s a love letter to both the familiar, steady sanctuary and the endless potential rabbit holes in the home just waiting to be discovered, and shows how just because you might be stationary physically, doesn’t mean you have to be mentally. Our motto? If you can’t go out, bring the outside in.

It's currently it’s mid-January - nearly a whole year on from the beginning of the pandemic - and it’s no secret that most of us would really rather not be at home right now.  

But, in the knowledge that we're still going to be here for a little longer, we're taking time to ensure home really is a sanctuary, a cross section of life so far, filled with treasures (books, photos, fragrances, furniture, fabrics) from favourite places near and far (no minimalism here, thank you very much). Things that bring the outside, inside. So, we can still all go on our weekend escapes…just from the comfort of our armchairs (which, actually, are highly preferable to plane seats anyway). Here’s how....

Pre-lockdown, Saturday evenings were strictly reserved for supper parties. And while our guest numbers are now capped at just two (i.e...me and my partner), our supper parties are still going strong in the name of table travel. So, on Saturday night, we went to Morocco. Via the kitchen. We’re certainly not chefs by any stretch of the imagination, but this rice (we added cloves and cinnamon too) is so delicious, and this salad is so good with homemade pita and a quick tahini-lemon-honey drizzle. Ok, it's not quite the same electric atmosphere Marrakech's medina, but light our orange, cinnamon and frankincense candle and you'll be pretty close. 

We then went on to India, via Wes Anderson’s 'The Darjeeling Limited'. Wes Anderson + India = a match made in heaven. Packed with sublime colours and scenes, it made me (perhaps counter productively) desperate to book a flight to India as soon as possible. To temper this urge for a short while at least, I’ve just purchased this book (which I'm saving for next weekend's lockdown sofa excursion).

And onto Sunday. Sundays usually, whether at home or elsewhere, are nearly always punctuated by explorative walks, and a good few hours curled up with a book and a candle. 

This Sunday’s literature of choice (along the theme of escapism, of course), was Cabana. While not strictly a book, if you know Cabana, you’ll know that it’s pretty much the finest visual escapism money can buy. So, on Sunday, I spent hours immersed in Cabana’s printed treasure troves of, well, cabanas(?) from all corners of the globe. Personal highlights included a lusciously botanical, very 100 Acres property in the Dominican Republic, and Luke Edward Hall’s gorgeous ‘Postcards from Italy’. Cabana truly is armchair travel at its finest. 

And while Sunday's simply aren't complete without a countryside walk, I'm locked down in London and so to get my Sunday countryside fix (and to complete my reading corner), our sublime Signature Candle is perfect. We’ve created it to quite simply be 100 acres of heavenly British countryside condensed into candle form and honestly, the smell is just heavenly. Packed with luscious, fragrant botanicals including lemon myrtle, rose geranium, lavender and underpinned by a base of rich cedarwood, it will make you feel like you’re lying in a warm, wild meadow at the height of British Summer. it fills the whole room with ease - simply light to unleash. 

To help you escape, we're actually gifting you this gorgeous candle, for free, on all orders over £60 (but be quick - there aren't many left). So to complete your Sunday stroll, pick up ‘Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds’, light this gorgeous candle and get lost in the abundant Cotswold countryside.

And so, I really hope you've enjoyed our first edition of ‘Escape with 100 Acres’. While a little different to the initial intention of the series, I hope it’s proven that weekend escapes don’t have to just be literal, and that you can still experience the the best aspects of travel and escapism (smells, tastes, sights) from within your own four walls, thanks to the curation and collection of a few characterful, fragrant things to help you along your way. If you can’t go out, bring the outside in. 

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Subscribe below to receive our notebook posts and other updates via email. As lockdown lifts,  the next edition of ‘Escape with 100 Acres’ will take you to our native ground…the Cotswolds. Sign up and we'll see you there. 

Receive a free Signature Candle (worth £30 on all orders over £60). Sign up to receive the secret code. 

Gift your loved ones 100 acres of heavenly British countryside this year. Or at least, the next best thing.

We know things are a little different this year. We’d love to be throwing weekend bags into the car or lugging wellies and coats onto a train, all in a bid for a little festive countryside escapism (after all, there really is nowhere better to spend Winter and Christmas than the British countryside). If we could, we’d spend every Winter's weekend there - exploring cosy hotels, searching out the best undiscovered walks and the coolest countryside bars. But, this year, it's not quite the same.

In case you and your loved ones are feeling similar, we wanted to create something that will help. You can still gift them 100 acres of heavenly British countryside (albeit, in a box).

Our bath gift set is everything you need to have the most glorious, leisurely Sunday soak. One that will make you feel like you’re immersed in a gorgeous country hotel rolltop bath, situated in 100 acres of fragrant, botanical British countryside (even if you’re actually in the same bath that you’ve been getting into for the past eight months). 

Our products are overflowing with overflowing with fragrant, rich botanicals to create scents reminiscent of walking through a wild British meadow, or the walled gardens of your favourite sprawling countryside hotel. This bath gift set is a scented incarnation of a weekend spent exploring 100 acres of heavenly British countryside, captured through scent and condensed for your loved ones’ bathroom. So, even if they’re not able to actually escape out to the British countryside this year, you can still gift them that feeling of indulgent, relaxing countryside escapism.

The British countryside is our ultimate muse. We’re founded on an insatiable love for it, and it’s why we exist. If we could, we really would spend all our days running through 100 acres of heavenly British countryside, although sadly, like most of us, we can’t. Countryside natives originally, we now split our time between the countryside and the city. So when we can, there is nothing we love more than escaping out to the countryside for a long, leisurely weekend. 

So, this is our ode to the glorious British countryside, and those heavenly weekends (necessary now more than ever, as we're writing this in the middle of lockdown). We hope that either it’ll resonate with you and provide you with a little virtual escapism, or inspire you to venture out to the rolling British countryside at the earliest possible opportunity.

It starts with Friday afternoon (or Thursday, if we’re really lucky). Weekend bags are randomly stuffed with all-eventualities clothing, odd wellies are gathered, and the car is piled with as many friends (or family, or pets - preferably all three) as will possibly fit. Whether you favour a splendid, sprawling countryside bolthole (Anthology Farm), an uber-cool, cosy inn (The Swan, Ascott) or an exquisite manor hotel (The Painswick), we guarantee the escape of your dreams can be found in the British countryside (and not that we like to blow our own trumpet, but we probably know it).

Just by being in the British countryside, even the most seemingly boring activities are more fun. 

For us, weekends in the British countryside are all about leisurely picnics in secret apple orchards, with nothing but a blanket, friends, wine and good bread. 

It’s about discovering wild swimming spots (even if it’s freezing), field yoga (yes, this is a thing) and that fresh cup of steaming hot coffee in a sunlit morning garden, taking time to soak up the surrounding oasis of ancient trees and early birdsong. 

It’s the lazy al-fresco lunches made with local herbs, fruits and vegetables; exploring old walled gardens and the sleepy Sunday strolls across the rolling meadows (preferably in D&D pyjamas and wellies).

Best of all, it’s the barefoot garden suppers that always go on a little longer than they should (hence why we favour a sprawling countryside bolthole). Imagine the fresh evening air; crisp, fresh and fragrant, infused with the wild botanicals all around. 

For us, this is what the British countryside is all about.

But, before you know it, Sunday evening rolls around. I’m actually writing this (slightly longingly) from my desk on a Tuesday afternoon, so clearly we can’t spend all our time frolicking in the British countryside (as much as we would love to). But, that's where 100 Acres comes in. 

100 Acres is our physical ode to the British countryside; our fragrance portal, if you will. We've created products that are scented incarnations of the fragrant countryside air - the rolling hills, walled gardens and wildflower fields. Made in the British countryside too, they're our weekend frolics in the countryside, bottled. That way, we - and you - can always immerse yourself in 100 acres of heavenly British countryside (whether you're actually there in real life or not). 

So, whether you’re having a slow Sunday soak with our sublime bubble bath, or a quick hand wash on a Monday afternoon, just one deep breath of our gorgeously fragranced products will instantly transport you to 100 acres of heavenly British countryside, wherever you are and any day of the week.