Rice

Augustin Ehrensvärd was probably more abreast of current affairs than he was of scientific nomenclature. He will have had the news, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that there were experiments underway by settlers in New England. This I've already written about: the experiments were to grow rice in north America.

Ehrensvärd wrote to Linnaeus with his own plan for rice-growing on his Saari estate in Finland. Linnaeus replied with enthusiasm.

What Ehrensvärd perhaps did not know was that the New England settlers must have known of the Ojibwa people of the Great Lake district. One of the Ojibwas' food staples was wild rice, which they harvested from canoes with sticks, since it grew and still grows in the water there. They had surpluses which they traded. Their food, like most earlier peoples, was about more than satisfying hunger: it had and still has to do with community and tradition. Traded rice must have reached the settlers - though colonists or imperialists (or sometimes refugees) might describe them more accurately.

The rice the Ojibwa people harvest now as then grows naturally in both northern America and in China. Its botanic name is Zizania aquatica.
Cultivated rice is Oryza sativa. The two plants are distant relatives, but of distinct genus. Oryza sativa in the indica variety is grown submerged for part of its cycle.

Perhaps Ehrensvärd was unaware of the distinctions; the Swedish (Ehrensvärd's language) for rice is ris and would have conveyed none of the important differences between the two plants. The Ojibwa word is manoomin and would mean less to Ehrensvärd. It's possible the New Englanders tried to grow Zizania aquatica and that Ehrensvärd heard tell of "rice"-growing experiments there.

The seed most likely to have been available to Ehrensvärd was probably Oryza sativa.

The excitement that Linnaeus felt would have been based on scientific knowledge, rather than hearsay. It was Linnaeus, Carl von Linné, who in 1753, at least ten years before Ehrensvärd's letter, classified and named both plants according to his own binomial nomenclature.

Linnaeus would have corrected Ehrensvärd's misconceptions about "rice" if there were any. It might also account for the fact that there are no records of the rice-growing experiments at Saari, beyond that first letter.