Wow these are gnarly. You may even want to take a multi year approach depending on your goals for the space(s) and your budget.

I’d see if you can hire a local three man arb crew to take them down chip the branches, buck the wood into 16” pieces for use by others, and dump the chips onsite for use as landscape mulch or compost. That way you are minimizing chip disposal and wood handling time for the crew and having them focus most on the things you can’t do yourself or don’t have time for.

Some considerations for order of removals:

- threats to buildings, parking spaces, recreational spaces and utilities

- brush drag distance for chipping

- intended use of the space in the trees’ absence

I can’t see the height or the volume of material in the crowns from the pics, but based on the trunk diameters and tree count, I’d say each tree will be 2-4 crew hours of processing. Plus daily travel to and from the site for the nearest competent tree company.

This time estimate depends on proximity to hazards, brush drag distance, and the ability of the individual trunks to be simply felled versus taken down with climbing and rigging.

This is a big job if there are 18 such specimens and you are looking to erase them including stumps.

A three man crew with a chip truck and a chipper and saws will be about $215USD/hr shop to shop daily. Plus whatever you want done with the stumps. That’s a different crew and machinery for those.

Based on the pics and lack of knowledge of the site layout and distance for the contractor, it gives a pretty wide range of pricing for the whole project. But even if the company is really close, you can count on a couple hours for daily travel and fueling/saw maintenance. At the low end, 24 crew hours. At the high end, a five day week of 10 hour shifts.

I can narrow this down with more pics of the upper crowns.

For individual targeted stump grinding with a Bobcat stump grinder attachment you can likely count on .75 to 1.25 hours per stump at $153USD/hr plus trucking of the machine at $114/hr. Where each stump is located you would expect to have an 8 to 10 inch depression in the ground mounded up with several bushels of wood chips and dirt that can be removed lor distributed in the immediate area.

Another approach depending on the site layout and nearby hazards may be to employ a large CMI300 forestry mulcher to push over and mulch the trees “in place” and disregard the stumps and surface roots. If the trees are situated in such a way that the machine can simply push them over and mulch them, leaving a 12 to 18 inch mattress of wood mulch where they stand, you could likely mulch all of them in a day for $2500-3000 including trucking. You would still be left with the top ends of the stumps and the root systems of the trees just beneath the topsoil.

It all comes down to machine hours, man hours and materials for these jobs. If you’d like to send me some more intel about the challenges of getting the trees down safely given what is around them, I might be able to narrow these hours down. But these look like “working trees” from the couple of pics.

There is a vast difference in time required to get a large tree down that is standing alone versus one growing over top of someone’s glass greenhouse.

Other considerations:

- overhead hazards

- underground utilities

- private vs public land

- permits

- what to do with the wood ie mechanical vs manual relocation

- saleability of the wood if salvaged in millable lengths

I hope this info is of help. But it is a doozer of a job from the looks of it.