Cindy Wilson gives her flowers away by the basketful. Matthew Buller spent 140 hours on a school clock that had been silent for decades.

Since Cindy Wilson retired in 2021, the flowers behind her house in Doney Park, Arizona, have been free to anyone who turns up for them. She grows them on nearly three acres below the San Francisco Peaks, northeast of Flagstaff, in beds marked by hand-painted signs, and this year she opened the gate six times. Visitors are handed shears and wicker baskets, most of them picked up at Goodwill, and one instruction: cut low, and take 15 stems. 1

Selling them had been the plan. A local florist was interested in buying what Wilson, 69, grew, and she had taught herself the work from florists' and gardeners' posts on social media, raising seedlings in her garage. Then wildfires and flooding hit the country around her. Her own house was spared. 1

She gave the first picking to the people whose houses were not: an invitation to Doney Park and Timberline, the two communities northeast of Flagstaff that the fires and floods had hit. "Hoping that I could just bring a bit of kindness and maybe a little joy," she told the Associated Press. 1

The garden is called the Garden House on Butterfly Lane, and the name is stamped on the kraft paper her neighbours wrap the bouquets in. Mary Walton, who has lived next door for 15 years, hears the bell across the street when a picking starts, usually rung by visiting children, and takes it as the signal that it is pick-it time. 1

Ask Wilson why she keeps opening the gate and she points at what happens in the beds: a woman weighing whether the yellow of a petal matches her living room, a boy showing his mother an orange flower. "How could I not do it?" she said. 1

The planting, the weeding and the opening are her own work, and six times in a season is, in her words, "a lot for me". The people who come are families with small children, students from Northern Arizona University nearby, and travellers driving through the state. With autumn here she is pruning what is left, feeding the soil and laying down straw and netting to wait out the winter, and she has already bought seed to sow in the spring. 1

The clock tower at Ripon Grammar School went up in 1889. The clock inside had not, so far as anyone can establish, worked properly for decades, and Jonathan Webb, in his tenth year as headmaster, had never heard it chime. When Matthew Buller arrived as the school's caretaker last October, he climbed up to have a look and stayed to fix it: about 140 hours of work in all. 2

Buller, 32, had never repaired a clock. He worked from an old manual he found online and advice from local experts, and did everything by hand, stripping the mechanism down into its individual parts and cleaning them. Scaffolding went up so the bells could be taken out and restored. By August the bells were chiming again. 2

The bill came to about £1,100, paid from a fundraiser that local people had given to. Buller's own comparison is the one that stays with me: a professional clock restorer charges roughly £400 a day. The tower is also, in his phrase, "a luxury item at the school" and does not take precedence over students' education budgets, so the work was his own, done on weekends and during his annual leave. 2

Getting up to it on a weekend was hard on some mornings. Hearing the first chime was "very exciting", he said, and then he waited for something to go wrong, and nothing did. What pleased him most was how much everyone else appreciated it. 2

Webb called it "absolutely amazing" that an employee so new to the school had taken the job on in his own time, and said the chimes were ringing out across the school once more. 2

The garden's picking season runs from late June into early September, so this year's is finished. The first opening of next year will go to Wilson's neighbours again, which is how the whole thing began, and visitors who want to can leave money towards what it costs her to keep growing. 1

Buller still turns the clock's mechanism by hand. The school's own site is ripongrammar.co.uk, and this morning's BBC round-up of stories from Yorkshire carries the clock alongside a running club for adults with learning disabilities and a husband who donated a kidney to his wife. 3