Starting this Forum topic for anyone to post some Eevee realism hacks!
For this one, I found out that you can bake an IrradianceVolume around the tree:
First, you add an IrradianceVolume and scale it to cover your entire tree, Secondly, make its resolution 8 on all axis (these can be as high or low as you want) I then set the cube map size to 1024, and the diffuse bounces to 5.
Here is a comparison between Eevee and cycles
With more Baking and lighting changes, the Eevee render could look closer to cycles.
Thanks for checking this out! feel free to post any of your own hacks!