I am only gonna make myself seem even denser, by explaining why I even thought to use SSS on bark, but maybe that's not possible. You can see though the stems of leaves right? I guessed with a bright enough light you might be able to see though thin branches too. The bark of a tree is made of fibers, or at least you can pull the fibers off in the inside of an old piece of bark. I can't go verify (it's cold wet and snowing last couple days) and never thought to try before, but I'd bet light can pass though those fibers. I have experimented on using SSS on trans mapped hair and it works no worse, maybe a bit better on some hair, than my other old stand by material for hair. So that's why I used SSS on it.

The blinn I used because I wanted the play of light from the side to look a bit better. I was looking at the way light played off the side of the tree in the morning, not shinny but it was kinda spread like I see from the effect of the blinn node, with rim lighting.

I had never thought to use the clay node, because when I think of clay, and that's about 90% of all the soil I have seen, it's shiny, to glossy. I never thought of how it looks when it's dried on something. I only had a short chance to try making the shader with clay node, and it does look similar to what I had, with default settings (likely used wrong the way I did it).

I would love to have the perfect procedural BB bark material, that makes every kind of bark in nature, but I'd settle happily for a half assed BB bark material. For now, just trying to hack together something. Shuy got me farther then I would have ever gotten on my own, and with time and BB's clay suggestion maybe I'll come up with something that if I hide it in the background it wouldn't draw my eye to it. If I had to use a man made maps, and the material in the end didn't look so wrong I'd be happy with that too.