When a community redesigns its town center, extreme care is always required. If the name of the community then merges with its town center like Anger in Berchtesgadener Land, then nothing should be missing. Because the village center of Anger is just an Anger – a community-owned meadow, complete with a Marian column and village fountain, almost 300 meters long, grazed by horses and sheep until the 1960s and now protected as a monument ensemble. And the community thought long and hard about it and planned it carefully. And then it quickly replanned a bit and inadvertently leveled large parts of the lean grassland in the village center, for which it received an award from the Minister for the Environment at the Bavarian Biodiversity Prize four years ago.
This part of the village green was not to be touched at all during the redesign. Because all the new sidewalks, water pipes, canals, drinking fountains, bike racks, bus shelters and lounge furniture from the preliminary planning are to be built a little further south towards the town hall. But if the area is to be redesigned on a larger scale, then the heavy vehicles, equipment and containers needed for the construction companies will have to go somewhere.
And there was space at the other end – on that piece of meadow that was honored by the ministry and which, according to botanist Barbara Fuchshuber-Draxl, is actually a semi-dry grassland and is home to many rare and endangered plant and insect species. Fuchshuber-Draxl and the Angerer Horticultural Association have been caring for the meadow by hand for almost ten years and were shocked that the town hall had apparently completely forgotten their work and the fruits of it. The landscape conservation association in Berchtesgadener Land even uses the area as a “seed donor meadow” for renaturation areas elsewhere in the district. A kind of hand-operated sweeper brushes the seeds out of the grass in a way that is gentle on insects.
This in turn could now benefit the donor meadow itself. After the rest of the village square has been redesigned, it will itself have to be renewed: after all, the conservationists in the district office, alerted by Fuchshuber-Draxl, still have original seeds in stock for this renaturation area.