Garden Mania - NYTimes.com Nature inspired the spring/summer 2013 haute couture shows - not the ramshackle romance of the overgrown garden but something more delicate, formal and melancholy. The models at Dior, bodices scattered with appliquéd petals and skirts ballooning with meadow flowers, moved through a spring garden, along a maze of topiaried box trees devised for the show by the Belgian landscape designer Martin Wirtz as an allusion to Raf Simons's childhood garden and to Monsieur Dior's rural retreat Le Moulin du Coudret. Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino drew on the actual structures of the garden: suits and skirts were embroidered with designs of borders and parterres. Dresses and capes enclosed the models within the looping patterns of wrought ironwork. And at Chanel, the early-19th-century Romantic poets Goethe and Schiller, whose verses extol the worship of untamed nature, influenced Karl Lagerfeld . His girls emerged from the shadows of an enchanted wood specially constructed for the Grand Palais, blinking into the light like Shakespearean revelers exiled from a masque, feathers framing the shoulders of their almost courtly garb, bedraggled plumes askew in their hair.