PROVO — Gone are the days when freeway interchanges were an afterthought, an ugly hulking mass of gray.

At an expense that sometimes exceeds $1 million, cities along the Wasatch Front are now carving out gardens in and around their interchanges. Where there was just concrete or weeds, there are now saplings and flower beds growing alongside on- and offramps throughout the state.

Salt Lake City paid more than $200,000 to install wrought-iron fencing and decorative lighting around four key interchanges leading into the city before the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Pleasant Grove just paid $1.7 million to landscape its new interchange, which includes a fountain that glows at night.

Orem's University Parkway interchange, which started Utah Valley's landscaping craze four years ago, practically smells like a flower nursery, with all the wood chips and bark covering its embankments.

Once nothing more than a mass of sloping concrete supported by thick beams of steel, freeway offramps are now a shining entrance, a gateway, a promise, even, that getting off at this particular exit will be worth it.

"I think now city leaders are saying, 'If we're going to have an offramp, let's make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible,' " says Geoff Dupaix, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Transportation. "They truly are seen as gateways into communities."

Since Orem landscaped its University Parkway interchange, other cities in Utah have followed suit, says Terry Johnson, UDOT's senior landscape architect. Work is under way to beautify interchanges in Draper, Lehi and Springville. In the end, the landscaping isn't really about aesthetics. It's about money. The goal is to lure people off the freeway and into the stores just beyond the stop lights, says Richard Jackson, a Brigham Young University professor who teaches urban planning.

"The main reason this is important for cities is sales tax revenue," Jackson says. "Cities want big box stores that generate a lot of sales tax revenue. That's why you will often see a row of auto dealerships along the main entrance into a city.

"Aesthetics generally comes behind issues of revenue generation."

A gateway to the future

Nowhere is that more evident than in Pleasant Grove.

When I-15 was built, city leaders in Pleasant Grove decided against a freeway offramp, fearing it would bring too much traffic and crime to their sleepy little hamlet.

"Well, 40 years later, they are realizing that was a mistake," said Pleasant Grove economic development director Paul Blanchard. "From an economic development standpoint, they really shot themselves in the foot."