Nigel Slater: My garden in spring | An exclusive secret tour of seasonal highlights

It's been the longest winter I can ever remember. I thought it would never end. It's been a very different winter for me because normally I go away. There's a month in each year when I'm just not around and because I'm not going away this year I've experienced the garden in a very different light. I'm seeing bits of the garden that I've never seen before. That fizz of green that you get for a very brief three weeks in the year when everything seems fresh, everything seems new, there's a vibrancy, the sap is rising, there's an energy in the garden that I've never seen before. One of the extraordinary things about spring in this garden is that yes it's mostly green but there are also these little pops of colour, these first white snow white snow drops, the little cowslips in amongst the green, these little glowing lights and then of course the tulips. I can't imagine not being able to walk out of my kitchen and pick some garden herbs. They've got to be here. They're kind of friends Basil and Rosemary and all the rest of them and I need them. I need them for my work, I need them for my daily cooking but also I need them in a way for something else. If I'm writing and I get to a particularly knotty sentence, something that isn't really working, I close my laptop and I come out into the garden and I run my fingers through the herbs on the herb table. That moment when you get a little bouquet of different herbs in your hand and you roll your hands around and just breathe in and suddenly your day starts again and I feel as if it unties all those little knots in my head. I can focus, I can concentrate and it's a healing thing but also it's an invigorating thing, it's an energising thing. Those essential oils that are in the leaves, just crush them between my fingers and it's like the heart and soul of my cooking, the heart and soul of my garden. They're good friends, they're always there no matter what else disappears for the winter. Rosemary, fennel, thyme, they're always there. This is sort of the engine room of the garden. It's a little microclimate because it's the outlet of the so it's warm all year and it doesn't freeze and right now I'm potting up the pelargoniums that have been in the cellar all winter. I'm taking out the dahlia tubers, putting them into fresh compost, putting grit on top, labelling them so they're ready to go out into the garden once I've pinched them out and made them into fuller plants. This time of year this is the busiest bit of the garden. I love being down here and there's dappled shade down here as well so I can grow this little hazel and there's a moment in spring when the catkins fall off and the curly leaves start to unfurl and it's at that moment that I truly know it's spring. So I do all my planning for the year ahead in the winter when I can see the shape of the garden so clearly, when all the lines are crisp and the architecture of the trees is completely clear, that's when I plan what's going to happen. And then within a few weeks it's all softened, it's become much gentler, all these pillows are green throughout the garden. I need those little pops of colour then, I need the tulips, I need the primroses, I need the tiny little purple flowers that appear on the canadensis. These are real pointers in the garden and I feel that it's coming alive again. Every year I come back from holiday and the garden is green and glowing orange and that colour comes from tulips and in particular Cairo, which is my favourite tulip, and then there's a few dark red ones in between. But this year the Cairo's failed, not a single one's come up, so what I've got is mostly dark red tulips. Nature's done my planning for me this year because I'd forgotten that in amongst the tulips were last year's gems, totally tangerine, and so they have popped up in amongst the dark red queen of night and the crimson and apricot flower. So I've got a completely different mix and I love it, I'm going to do it again next year. One of the jobs I've really loved this spring is growing sweet peas from seed and tying the tiny delicate little tendrils to the hazel hurdles, just nurturing them, just teasing them, but up around the sticks and I'm loving it. When I first moved in I wanted enclosure and privacy so I planted ivy hedges and I just let them do their own thing for 10 years and then realised that what I created was a very dark space, also a home for millions of slugs and snails which love to be in the ivy. So as well as the bird's nests I got things I didn't want and last year I decided to rip out the big ivy hedge, the boundary between me and the neighbours and with the light that came into the garden I suddenly realised I got a whole new bed to play with and it had got to be roses. I've always wanted to grow them so out came my little colouring book working out that I wanted pinks and apricots and whites and I plotted where I was going to put everything and in winter it just seemed there was just nothing here. There was the architecture, there was the big lumps of yew and hornbeam but now it's all happening, it's all coming to life and once I'd pruned and I love pruning roses, I think it's something I've inherited from my father, once all the new life started to come, those little red shoots, the dark maroon signs that springs on its way, I decided to mulch very deeply all the way through the rosebed and then just watching the new leaves unfurl and in amongst the roses I planted lanaria and dicentra. I can't wait to see what's going to happen and how all the colours merge together and how all the roses get on with one another. I'm looking forward to that. I knew I didn't want the garden to be just formal, I wanted it to have a wild feel as well so the middle bit of the garden between the two big yew hedges I planted what was I suppose almost like a woodland with viburnums, an apple tree, a cornice, things that I could just leave to do their own thing. Six weeks ago this was just brown, it was the leaf in sight and then suddenly it's just popped into life. The aces have opened the moment the sun came out, all the blossom on my apple tree suddenly appeared, all the little white flowers on the viburnums have come out, the whole thing sprung to life in a matter of weeks and feels like a different space. When I was a kid we had an apple tree in the garden, it was a discovery and I knew that one of the first things I would plant in any garden that I had was that discovery apple tree. So 25 years ago I put in the tiniest little twig and it's now one of my favourite trees in the garden and never more so than now when it bursts into blossom. It's the whitest of blossoms, the whitest of blooms and it lasts for several weeks and then I get the apples themselves with their white flesh that's just brushed with strawberry pink, crisp and sweet, one of my favourites of all. And there's the very end to this garden which feels like the secret space of all and it's where I've grown hydrangeas and it's also where I put the cornus to recover after its move. I think it's going to be okay. So this is spring but the reality of spring is it's a very short season so the moment I see the wisteria starting to open, I see the first bees and butterflies in the garden, I know that summer's coming. There's going to be some big changes. It's all going to start happening. This is just the prelude. It's the very beginning of the year.