In the rice country south of Milan, in July, the paddies around our estate — Tenuta Colombara, in Piedmont — are green. The plants have closed the gaps between the rows, the water is barely visible any more, and from a distance the checkered sea looks like an ordinary meadow.

It isn't. In these days, inside every stem, the most important thing of the year is taking place.

Inside the stem

Open a stem: inside you will find the panicle, already formed, still closed within the sheath of the last leaf. The stem has swollen to make room for it, and has taken the shape of a small barrel. That is where the name comes from — in Italian, botticella.

How many spikelets that panicle will carry is by now settled. What is being decided now is another matter: whether they will be full or empty. During booting the plant is at its most sensitive to the cold, and a few chilly nights can leave the spikelets sterile. They will emerge as normal, they will flower, and they will stay empty. The field will look fine right up to the harvest.

The paddies here sit at the foot of the Alps. In July, a chilly night is not a remote possibility.

Rice panicle opened by hand, booting stage

The water is a blanket

The water in the paddy does many things at once. It meets the plant's water requirements, which are enormous, and it keeps weeds at bay. But above all it does something no other technique could do: it regulates the temperature.

Water warms slowly and cools slowly. By day it takes in the heat of the sun; by night it gives it back. In a flooded paddy a daily temperature swing of 10-15 °C is reduced to 3-4 °C. It is called a thermal flywheel, and it is one of the reasons rice can ripen this far north.

For this reason, during booting, when a drop in temperature is forecast, the water in the fields is raised. The panicle, still closed, spends the night sheltered.

The checkered sea, before being a landscape, is a thermostat.

The flowering no one sees

In a few days the panicles will emerge from their sheath. Then they will flower — and it is an event almost no one sees.

Rice flowers open between late morning and early afternoon: earlier on clear days, later on humid ones. Each spikelet stays open for one to two and a half hours, self-pollinates in nearly every case, and closes again. The round begins at the tip of the panicle and moves downwards.

The pollen lives about five minutes.

From then on, all the rice needs is time. Ripening runs through to the harvest, between September and October. And after that, for our rice, at least twelve months of rest before the twenty stages that will bring it to your table.