After completing his O-Levels in 1948, Ball studied at Whitgift School, where he was taught by Cecil Thomas Prime,[1] co-author of The Shorter British Flora (1948).
While he was a graduate student, he worked with Tutin on a revision of Salicornia for the second edition of Flora of the British Isles (1962).
As a graduate student, he also worked, with the support of a Leverhulme Fellowship, from 1957 to 1959 at the University of Liverpool on the Flora Europaea project.
For both his Salicornia work and for the Flora Europaea Ball undertook many collecting trips in both Britain and in southern Europe, visiting Greece in 1961, former Yugoslavia (south-west Serbia in particular) in 1963 and Spain (Almeria) in 1967.
He contributed to and co-edited, with Anton A. Reznicek and David F. Murray, the Cyperaceae section of the Flora of North America.