The paper is concerned with the first sentence of Vsevolod Ivanov’s story «Clay coat» (1921): «The palm tree is not common in Siberia…» The fate of this phrase turned out to be more successful than that of the story. The paper suggests two contexts associated with Siberia and young Ivanov’s contacts with the Omsk writer Anton Semenovich Sorokin. Firstly, it is an eccentric personality of the gardener Peter Savvich Komissarov who grew exotic plants and dreamed of growing a palm in a village near Omsk. Secondly, the Christmas story «Dates» published early in 1919 in the Omsk newspaper «Zar’a» («Dawn») with the signature «Kio-Ko». A hypothesis has been incidentally proposed that the pen names «Kio-Ko» and «Pitirim Cyparisov» belong to Anton Sorokin and his circle of writers, to which young Vsevolod Ivanov belonged as well.