of Toronto. At the end of the
First World War Ukraine revolted against the Russian Empire and at the
same time she was fighting for her independence with Poland.

At that time my father's family lived in the city of Stanyslaviv at the
northern foot of the Carpathians. I asked my sister to send me as many
local English walnut seeds by mail as she could. Giving such an order to
my sister I expected that the nuts would arrive not later than the end
of October, just in time to be planted before the freeze up. This was in
1921.

I remembered from my boyhood that planting of English walnut seeds was
surrounded by some mystery. It seemed to me that people in Ukraine
regarded it as a very difficult matter to cultivate walnut trees.

Being under such a notion myself I asked a horticulturist how long the
germination power of a walnut seed would last. He told me that it could
prevail in a fresh walnut not longer than a week. He advised me in order
to prevent walnuts from drying to dip them in melted parawax. Following
that information I wrote my sister to parawax the walnut seeds before
sending them to Canada.

Owing to the Polish-Ukrainian war at that time the shipment of the
walnut seeds got to Toronto not late in the Fall, as had been expected,
but in February when the farm land around Toronto was frozen. And the
worst of it was my sister did not parawax the nuts!

Being sure the kernels were dead I allowed the children to do what they
pleased with them. But before they cracked the last one my wife advised
me to plant a dozen of the nuts in our flower pots, as she said, "for
fun". I did it. Other nuts the children destroyed, and in spite of my
sorrow and anguish in two weeks the walnut sprouts came up in the pots.
Everyone of them came up, proving that you do not need to protect walnut
germination by dipping the nuts into melted parawax.

From the flower pots the walnut seedlings were transplanted that spring
of 1922 into our city garden at 48 Peterboro Ave., Toronto.

At least a thousand of the kernels of several varieties were thus
destroyed and I was obliged to wait until another fall when the _Juglans
regia_ nuts were sent again by my sister. They came also late in the
winter and were dry as pepper.

In the spring of 1923 I took the walnut seeds of the second shipment to
the farm of my friend Mr. M. Kozak located a couple of miles north of
the Scarboro Golf Club. There I soaked them in water in a tub for five
days