AWalter Crane wallpaper inspired by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and the Flower and the Leaf won a Special Medal at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Crane's three–section design, following a current fashion, makes possible an expressive interaction of symbols and themes: Nature, women, morality, love and domestic virtues, a list reflecting popular images of Chaucer during the previous sixty years. The dado, its lower section, depicts lilies and doves, symbolizing purity and faithful marriage. The middle section shows daisies and words from a song in the Flower and the Leaf: ‘SI DOUCE EST LA MARGARETE ’. Another quotation joins this to the frieze: ‘TO WHOM DO YE OWE YOUR SERVICE? & WHICH WILL YE HONOUR TELL ME I PRAY THIS YERE THE LEAF OR THE FLOWER? ’ In the frieze Alceste and Love hold hands, recalling Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (F 241–42), where they also command the poet to praise faithful women. Accom panying them are caryatid–like female figures representing Diligence, Hospitality, Order and Providence, virtues of the housewife symbolically holding up the roof. Yet domestic virtues figure nowhere in either medieval poem. They have emerged from half a century of remaking, together with many other elements that make up the complex figure of the nineteenth–century Chaucer.

This wallpaper illustrates what, to a modern eye, is the period's extraordinary admiration for the Flower and the Leaf, due only partly, I think, to belief that it was by Chaucer. The same admiration is found in Dryden's refashioning of it as a fiercely moral poem, and in the nineteenth– century perception of it as the essence of Chaucer as a Nature–poet, an image derived from some genuine writings, especially Chaucer's dream poetry and the spring opening to the Canterbury Tales, plus apocryphal texts including the Flower and the Leaf, which appeared in editions of Chaucer from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, when scholarship proved the attributions false.

The imaginative power of the image cannot be overstated. Writer after writer hails Chaucer as a ruddy–cheeked, cheery lover of early morning walks and fresh air, a model for English masculinity. Fitzgerald, for example:

How the fresh air of the Kent hills, over which he rode four hundred years ago, breathes in his verse still.