FAIRBANKS — Most sheds aren’t much to look at. But the new cordwood garden shed at the Georgeson Botanical Gardens could almost pass for a Victorian stone building from afar, sitting on a hill among a riot of red and pink poppies and giant sunflowers.

It was actually built of recycled telephone poles by 16 students taking a cordwood masonry workshop through the University of Alaska Fairbanks summer session.

The 8-by-8 foot frame was filled with about 20 workers constructing walls out of logs, mortar and sawdust. The walls stood about one foot wide and two feet high Wednesday afternoon. Cordwood masonry uses mortar to cement together short, round pieces of wood — like firewood — with their ends pointing out, incorporating creative patterns and mixed materials.

“Most people haven’t heard of it, but it’s been around for hundreds of years,” said Rob Roy, who taught the class with his wife Jaki. The couple owns a green building school in upstate New York. They have built multiple cordwood homes and teach workshops around the country. Roy, who gave a talk Monday at UAF on affordable home ownership, promotes cordwood masonry as a sustainable, low-cost and creative style of architecture.

Using recycled materials is one way to lower costs and environmental impact.

“You can use hollow waste wood, beetle kill, anything unsuitable for a saw mill,” Roy said.

Local construction company Norcon Inc. donated 300 board feet of peeled logs for the shed project.

For three days, participants attended morning lectures and afternoon building sessions. Some mixed water into mortar while others created the walls, forming lengthwise troughs out of mortar and filling it with sawdust. The crew was seeking to finish the shed in three days.

Cordwood homes are considered less labor-intensive than log homes.

“You can do it as one person, which is what I like about it,” said Lorna Curran, one of the class members. “You don’t have to have long logs.”

It’s also easy to increase the thickness of your walls by using longer chunks of log, Roy said.

“The colder the climate, the thicker you can build the walls,” he said.

While the logs act as ventilation, allowing the building to breathe, sawdust acts as insulation. The shed’s three-inch layer of sawdust has an R-value, or a thermal resistance, of 9.

“If you’re building a house, you can make 24-inch walls with 12 inches of insulation. That’s R-36,” Roy said.

Masonry mortar, made out of Portland cement, sand and lime, acts as thermal mass, giving the wall the ability to store heat.

At the end of each day, the workers pointed the mortar with a flat-edge knife to give it a clean, smooth look.

“It’s like putting icing on a cake,” said Alena Anderson, a Fairbanks resident in the class.

Each wall is a unique collage of round, split and fragmented logs, a fundamental of cordwood masonry.

“They’re supposed to have a random-type pattern. Some have a design that looks Swiss,” Anderson said.

The group planned to add glass bottles into the walls for lighting and color.

“I asked the class if they wanted to do a UAF design,” said AJ Chapman, a wood cutter who traveled up from Seward for the class. “I think we’re going to make a butterfly, and maybe a mushroom.”

The shed will be topped with a sod roof that also will contain plants.

“This gives us more photosynthesizing area,” said Grant Matheke, who works at the garden and framed the shed with spruce beams.

Several of the class members said they were ready to build their own cordwood garage or sauna, another advantage of the building method.

“All this work has been done by inexperienced people. You can teach people in two to three days,” Roy said.

The class finished about half the shed by Thursday, and a work party will complete the project.

Contact staff writer Molly Rettig at 459-7590.