I do not have a very deep sympathy pool when it comes to members of the Royal Family visiting the Chelsea Flower Show. I was in Chelsea on that famous day in 1999 when the already grotesque traffic queues came to a complete halt as four separate convoys of minor royals, including Princess Michael of Kent and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucestershire, glided seamlessly in with police outriders as the working folk of London were left to boil in their cars.

Yet it's hard not to have some empathy with the Duke of Edinburgh, who splendidly fulfilled his grumpy old man duties when he came face to face with that most terrible species this week: the gardening bore. When he tried to compliment some Australian celebrity gardener on his “tree fern” - not that easy when plants are kind of, well, plants - Jamie Durie went into full pomposity mode. “Actually, it's not a tree fern, it's a member of the cycad family,” he said. “It's a Macrozamia moorei.” Philip promptly walked away, muttering: “I didn't come here to get a lesson.”

Who, with hand on heart, can blame him? We have all at some time felt the force of gardening bores ourselves, the ones who take us through a full landscape story, who get sneery over hanging baskets, have fridge magnets saying “Gardeners do it in their wellies!” and don't even laugh when you say “Go on, then - show us your clematis”.

Rather like celebrity chefs, gardeners seem to have cast themselves as superior beings, sorcerers of the natural world. But it is a game of ruthless ambition. Remember when Diarmuid Gavin fell out with Bunny Guinness, the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, over the height of a wall between their displays? Diarmuid accused Bunny of “snobbery, elitism and rudeness”, while she called him “a nasty piece of work”.

Like real ale bores, car bores and DIY bores, gardening bores need to realise that sometimes we're just taking a polite interest and we're not that bothered.

They're plants. They look nice. Get over it.

Times recommends

• Dumped by my best friend
• I froze my eggs
• Just give them grit