Chess flower meadows

Chess flower with white bloom, characteristic of the Sassenberg occurrence

Hesselwiese with blooming chess flowers. In the background: high cowslip ( Primula elatior )

The Schachblumenwiesen are a nature reserve in the urban area of Sassenberg in the Münsterland in North Rhine-Westphalia . It is one of the few areas in Germany where the strictly protected chess flower ( Fritillaria meleagris ) still occurs.

Part of the meadow area on the Hessel was designated as a nature reserve in 1956 on an area of 1.8 hectares. In 1957 about 55,000 chess flowers were counted. In the 1960s, the number of flowering plants decreased. In 1977 the town council had over 3,000 chess flowers excavated from a private garden and transplanted into another meadow area. In the meantime, a large part of this area of around 91 hectares has been placed under nature protection together with the “Sassenberger Tiergarten” forest area. The locations are closely monitored during the weeks when the chess flowers are in bloom. In 2014 only around a thousand flowers were counted.

The Sassenberg chess flower meadows are probably not a natural occurrence. The plants are probably garden refugees from the former Sassenberg palace gardens, which over the course of time grew wild on the Hesselwiesen. This is supported by the fact that originally an almost pure population of the rare white color variant was to be found here, due to a possible genetic bottleneck . Here there were probably only very few pure white-flowered specimens (possibly even just a single specimen) ancestral parents of a whole range of many thousands of individuals. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, “foreign” chess flowers were presumably introduced into this isolated, almost pure white-blooded population, which increasingly take away the uniqueness of Sassenberg's “white wonder”.

literature

Fritz Runge : The “white miracle of Sassenberg”. In: Nature and Landscape. 34th vol., H. 1. Mainz 1959, pp. 9-10
Fritz Runge: The chess flower meadows near Sassenberg . In: An Ems and Lippe - home calendar for the Warendorf district. 1979, pp. 47-48
Fritz Runge: The nature reserves of Westphalia and the former administrative district of Osnabrück . 4th edition, Münster 1982, pp. 253-54
Volker Scherfose: Development and socialization of the chess flower ( Fritillaria meleagris L.) in the NSG Tiergarten (expansion of the chess flower meadows; Warendorf district). In: Reports of the Bielefeld Natural Science Association. Volume 34 (1993) pp. 263-272