HI, thanks for posting. Could you send us the scene and assets trough our support contact form so we can review it? Please include a link to this thread in you e-mail.
You should check for faulty materials on those trees, just select them and choose get materials from selected objects in the slate editor. For instance my render crashes when having an old raytrace map. There might be some funky things going on with the materials.
I haven’t tried with a different light no, but yes it is lit with HDRi.
Denoiser wasn’t on for the image above, but it was for earlier images. Which is where I first noticed the issue.
Thing is I’ve rendered this scene many times already and it’s been fine. Just this latest re-render throwing this issue up. Tree’s have been the same throughout.