This week has been really GOOD. (And it’s only Wednesday!) I’ve spent my afternoon today kneeling in the middle of a roundabout – one of the ones with a series of connecting tunnels underneath for pedestrians with the cars zooming over the top.

You may think that doesn’t sound like an auspicious start but nonetheless, had you walked across that roundabout through the tunnels that connect Plymouth’s city centre to the station and the University then you’d have spotted me. Well, you may not actually as I had my face a few inches above the grass and (sadly) my bottom in the air while I counted bellis perennis (daisies), taraxacum officinale (dandelion), plantago lanceolata (plantain) etc etc.

I’ve been like the proverbial pig in muck. In fact, I walked back to the lab with the knees of my trousers liberally plastered with mud, water and stray bits of plant and grinning like a crazy woman.

We’ve been studying ecology and the exercise was to look at the species of wild flower that live in grass and assess the extent to which the way the grassy slope faced (south or north) made a difference to the plant population.

The way you do it is to use a quadrant – a metre square of wire mesh, put it on the ground and then count what’s in it. This requires lots of plastic bags for carrying unidentified samples, a lot of peering at soil, plants, grass etc. It requires a bit of telling people to get off out of your light, a bit of pain (scabby knee from a fall last week in the city centre) and some stiffness from being hunched up over the quadrant all afternoon.

So, you may look at this photo and think it’s just a patch of scrubby grass with a few weeds but I know it’s got all of the above (see para 2) because I can see them from the photo and almost certainly lots more besides that I can’t see without going back to that particular spot and doing it all again.

There truly are worse ways to spend an afternoon than counting daisies (many, many of them) but I can’t think of all that many better ways of spending time!