Steve Elliott
Here's a quick attempt I made to look at endgrain alder. (Pretty sure it's alder, but can't guarantee it.) The scrap I found was crosscut with a good blade on a commercial tablesaw and the surface is shown on the left. I pared a small area with a fairly sharp chisel and that surface is shown on the right. To make the file size small enough to upload I had to use considerable compression on the image, so some of the fuzziness is due to that.

Compared to your image, Larry, the difference in depth of field is enormous. That's a big advantage of electron microscopes. I also suspect the sample in the SEM image was prepared much more carefully than mine was.