It’s quite the sight for passers-by. A group of girls, innocently provocative yet tellingly playful, shrouded between succulent alps of black alder and silver birch. Wreathed in flowered daisy dukes and cherried heart-shaped sunglasses, they’re the daydream of a young schoolboy. German water nymphs invite you to come, to swim, to play. Just a dip. A dip! It’s a lucid dream you never want to leave: Pale fairies kiss ripples in a cerulean lake, smooched with red lips and tanned with the perfect sunburn. It’s summertime in Bavaria, Germany. If Hansel and Gretel had stumbled upon this girlish fairytale before falling into the witch’s candied cottage, perhaps their fairytale would’ve ended differently, for between these pages are girls just as sweet.

Ellen von Unwerth, a German photographer whose work has been featured in the likes of Flaunt Magazine, Vogue, Interview, and her very own Von, has boarded a train back in time and landed in the lush countryside of her homeland. Her new photo book Heimat, published by Taschen, is rich with German tradition and region-love as von Unwerth follows maidens through the brush. She captures them in the manner she knows best: Daring, arousing, candid, and mischievously feminine. Von Unwerth and these girls know something we don’t.

The screeching and kittenish joie de vivre captured in von Unwerth’s Heimat finds girls laden with lederhosen while indulging in Bavaria’s secret world and fantastical lore, kayaking in lakes, hunting foxes, kneading pretzel dough and drinking beer. Heimat finds solace in dress designs by Munich-based designer Lola Paltinger, whose sumptuous dirndls trickle romantically on German land, with beads tinkling like tiny gleaming stars on von Unwerth's bewitching girls.

Von Unwerth—who began her career as a model before stepping behind the camera—combines homey old-world charm with rich, sexy finesse in Heimat. When it comes to defining the cult-classic photographer, it’s likely easiest to start with the question, “Who has von Unwerth not photographed?” as opposed to the opposite. Her clientele—supermodels, actors and musicians, the women who forged pop culture—is as time-traversing and kitsch as her style, including Kate Moss, Lana Del Rey, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Campbell, and Anya Taylor-Joy. Von Unwerth’s cheeky (in more than one way) photographs are idyllic invitations licked and sealed in Heimat, like secluded confessions of a life tucked away in the rumbling hills of Bavaria.

You can purchase the book here.