'Thrusting aside the soil'

The Old Manse is an old house in Concord, Mass.,  famous for its  historical and literary associations.

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over  my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.''
 

--  Nathaniel Hawthorne,  from Mosses from an Old Manse

In 1842, the novelist   Nathaniel Hawthorne rented the Old Manse for $100 a year. He moved in with his wife, Transcendentalist Sophia Peabody, on July 9, 1842, as newlyweds and lived there for three years before  they were being evicted for not paying their rent.

Ms. Peabody had previously visited Concord and met Ralph Waldo Emerson while working on a bas-relief portrait medallion of his brother Charles, who had died in 1836. She praised the town to Hawthorne. Before the Hawthornes' arrival at the Manse, Henry David Thoreau created a vegetable garden for the couple.  In the upstairs room that Hawthorne used as his study, you can see  affectionate sentiments that the two etched into the window panes.