Asian cultivated rice, the most widely grown cereal grain, a grass that is typically grown as a field crop in flooded paddies rather than as a garden or houseplant. Key to growing it is consistent water in lowland paddies or steady moisture in upland fields, with warm sun.
Family
Poaceae (Grass family)
Grows as
Grass
Light
Full sun
Water
Keep soil flooded or saturated in lowland paddies; upland types need regular moisture.
Soil
Puddled clay or loam for flooded paddies; well-drained loam for upland rice.
Temperature
20–35 °C during growth; protect from frost, which it cannot tolerate.
How easy
Moderate
Safety
Not known to be toxic
Native range
as a cultigen from China
Climate
temperate
About
Oryza sativa, having the common name Asian cultivated rice, is the much more common of the two rice species cultivated as a cereal, the other species being O. glaberrima, African rice. It was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin in China 13,500 to 8,200 years ago.
Oryza sativa belongs to the genus Oryza and the BOP clade in the grass family Poaceae. With a genome consisting of 430 Mbp across 12 chromosomes, it is renowned for being easy to genetically modify and is a model organism for the study of the biology of cereals and monocots.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Oryza sativa by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.