Garden: Simply take two cabbages...

...stick them in a galvanised aluminium bucket and - hey presto! - you have a truly modern flower arrangement. Well, not quite. But achieving cutting-edge effects with your garden flowers is, in fact, nearly as simple

If the proliferation of garden centres, magazines and TV programmes is any indication, there can be few people left in this country who do not have access to a well-stocked, carefully designed garden, container or window box. We worry about the lack of year-round colour, we rotate our seasonal displays and we give careful consideration to shape and form. So it is curious that when it comes to floral displays inside the home, most of us are content to stuff a shapeless bunch of flowers into whatever vase may come to hand.

The gentle art of flower-arranging has so far failed to move itself into the modern world. Traditional displays are impossibly formal: elaborate triangles, inverted crescents, diagonals and Hogarth curves - a sort of elongated S-shape - all of which are better suited to churches' aisles and wedding receptions than to breakfast tables and window-sills. Add to that the need for foam, "frogs" and tape, and it is enough to make anyone reach for the plastic daffodils.

Creating an attractive display doesn't need to be so complicated. Inspiration is often available at a decent flower shop, which is quite likely to recommend using something that you are already growing in your own garden, even if it hadn't occurred to you to pick it. Talk to any couture florist and he or she will guide you towards a modern arrangement. Because to be truly fashionable - and florists talk about new collections in the same way that clothes designers do - flower arrangements have to complement other design trends.

Nicky Tibbles runs two branches of her west-London shop, Wild at Heart. She sends out her flowers from tiny premises, decorated in white and steel, where the display is usually limited to a single colour or variety: pale pink peonies in early summer; a mass of sweet peas, all in an identical shade. She advocates simplicity in any arrangement: a single lily or delphinium in a plain container, 50 identical stems grouped together, or a tiny posy of cornflowers or freesias, with the stems cut short and tied together.

Any would-be flower arranger, even one with the tiniest of gardens, should be able to find a few specimens to bring indoors without detracting from the display outside. In the past, large estates would always dedicate an area to growing flowers for cutting, and anyone with a large enough garden could consider setting aside a bed for this purpose, filling it with a succession of bulbs, herbaceous flowers, and autumnal dahlias and chrysanthemums.

More imagination is needed if you don't have the space for a separate cutting-area. The thing about bringing home-grown flowers inside is that you will be forced to stick to those that are seasonal. Many florists have come to despise flowers such as gladioli, whose year-round availability, as a result of importing them from abroad, is now causing them to be spurned by shoppers.

Sonia Waites would quite happily make up an arrangement with little or nothing in the way of flowers. She is the director of Pulbrook and Gould, which has been selling flowers in London's Sloane Street and further afield for more than 40 years. Her emporium is far too classy to fall prey to passing fashion, yet she is aware of the need for flowers to look effective alongside modern interior design styles.

For a simple, but dramatic, effect, she recommends Solomon's seal, with its arching stems and creamy, bell-like flowers. Though not usually employed as a cut flower, this could be combined with some grasses, or a particularly dramatic piece of foliage. Recently she has been using angular artichoke leaves, but hostas, with their range of tones, and the sharp blades of phormium, can also be striking.

Many of us spend considerable time and effort finding suitable pots to plant up outside, but when it comes to containers for flower arrangements we have a selection that would embarrass the average car boot sale. Containers - and remember that stylish arrangements never go into vases - should enhance, not detract from, whatever is put into them.

Avoid anything bright and garish, unless you are displaying it, empty, as an ornament. And if you wouldn't put a plant in it in the garden, don't put any arrangement in it in the house.