Knitting needles can be a cure, as grans and Georgian ladies knew

Along with producing useful things, old-fashioned, by-hand hobbies reduce anxiety - just ask a perpetual teeth-grinder who found relief by casting on yarn

- Charmain Naidoo

When I imagine my mother, gone these past 26 years, I see her in her garden, humming gently, a pair of secateurs in her muddy gardening-gloved hands.

Her back bent — one half of a parenthesis — as she tended her prized roses. Trimming, shaping, pruning, cutting: a tuneless strain, more mantra than song, emerging from her into the garden. Tendrils of brown curls escaping from under her scarf. Outside with her roses; that was my mother’s happy place.

The roses. Ladysmith’s hot, dry summers and frosty winters apparently make hardy, disease-resistant roses the favourites, so my mama grew resilient varieties. There was the quintessential hybrid tea rose with its large scented blooms and long strong stems that were perfect for the vase.

The Queen Elizabeth, named soon after the late queen’s coronation in 1954, with its tall, iconic, pink grandiflora.

The white iceberg, created in the year of my birth, 1958. These she planted down the side of the house, in a bed she called her night garden. In it, the icebergs gave off a luminous glow, reflecting the moonlight.

We knew instinctively that gardening was her refuge, her “do not disturb me” time that she used to decompress, take a break from being a teacher and a mother of four, from cooking and marking papers.

My mom did not embroider or do cross-stitch; she did not knit or crochet or quilt or sew. Nor did she tie knots into macramé.

But she did have two “old lady hobbies” she was passionate about: doing the crossword, always with a nice cup of tea, and gardening. Digging in the soil, spending time outdoors exposed to the elements in an impossibly wide straw hat. This was my highly strung mother’s Prozac; it’s what I now see as the tool she used to stop her from frequently losing her temper.