If you’ve been curious about progress in the Waco area, Thursday’s Greater Waco Community Visioning Project Celebration and Expo was a terrific way to learn more, aside from perusing the online archives of the Tribune-Herald .

As Trib business editor Mike Copeland outlined in Friday’s edition, NeighborWorks unveiled plans for a gated apartment complex downtown, complete with a railway station motif. And Cameron Park Zoo officials detailed their next dream project — a 32,000-square-foot education building at the zoo’s entrance.

Granted, some of what we learned might have seemed irrelevant in the grand scheme of things going on in our area. Then again, even what might qualify as footnotes offered some illuminating moments. A few fleeting examples:

* Kay Olson, charming, energetic co-chair of Cameron Park Centennial activities, spent the Expo drumming up interest in upcoming events, including a May 27 luncheon honoring the extended clan of William Cameron, whose family gave Waco what eventually became heavily wooded, 416-acre Cameron Park.

She also had an advance copy of the park history and picture book due from Baylor Press this month. But she conceded she also learned plenty from veteran Trib staff writer J.B. Smith’s research for a special newspaper supplement about Cameron Park, including a list of invasive plant species that, however pretty, are overtaking some of the popular park’s natural flora.

Biggest surprise: The attractive Nandina shrubs in the park — complete with distinctive red berries — are not park natives at all but hail from China and Japan. In fact, some botanists would like to strip them from the park. Some Texans who have found them in their yards call them “wasp-catchers.”

Not that Olson is necessarily convinced of the impropriety of all this.

“I love Nandinas and I certainly don’t think of them as invasive,” she said. “And here we have it on almost every page of this book, and it turns out it’s invasive!”

I told Olson that I didn’t think this would diminish future prospects of either book or park. In fact, Japanese honeysuckle is also an invasive species much on the loose at Cameron Park — and its attractive scent permeated the grounds during the May 1 centennial activities. It was heavenly.

* Successful local insurance executive Tom Chase leveled with me about the huge, framed, old-time photos at the front of his newly opened Barnett’s Irish-styled Pub downtown. Some patrons have been told the photos are of the Barnetts, the engaging pub proprietor’s honorable and very worthy ancestors. Except they’re not.

They’re actually the Striblings, not the Barnetts, though they are ancestors of Tom Chase. The reason he jokingly introduces them as the Barnetts is because the pub is called Barnett’s. And the reason it’s called Barnett’s Pub is because the place used to be the J.S. Barnett Company, an office supply store, till its closure many years ago.

And Chase so loved the old sign out front he called the pub Barnett’s when he opened it this year: “Besides, it would have cost me $1,000 to take the old sign down.”

Not that it matters if you mess up one or two details about all this, he told me.

“It’s all a lie,” he quipped of the pictured old-timers on the wall, “so it doesn’t make any difference what I tell people.”

But the honest truth is they’re Striblings, not Barnetts.

* Business continues at the Waco Mammoth Site, which opened last year. Plans to expand it include a paleo-dig site for youths, to teach them about the marvels of paleontology, and a bigger welcome center.

Khristen Jarvis, who was at the Community Visioning Project Celebration representing the site, said many youths visiting the grounds — built where a herd of Columbian mammoths was unearthed in 1978 — seem up to date on their mammoth lore, including their extinction.

Parents are definitely another matter.

One interesting question occasionally offered by tired parents, no doubt weary from charting many miles with their kids on mind-numbing, long-distance vacations: “Where are the real mammoths?”

Where, indeed.

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