Trees need to deal with seasonal drought stress in tropical dry forests. As an ecological strategy, evergreen species tend to be conservative in their stress tolerance, and deciduous species tend to adopt resource-acquisitive strategies, escaping stress by shedding all their leaves during the dry season. Ankarafantsika National Park, situated in northwestern Madagascar, encompasses a natural forest stand on a white-sand hill with a 6-month-long dry season, during which cumulative precipitation is < 10 mm, while the annual precipitation usually exceeds 1,200 mm. Evergreen and deciduous species seem co-dominant in this forest, and among the deciduous species, the difference in the onset of leaf shedding from the beginning to the end of the dry season leads to a large variation in their leafless duration. We studied variations in leaf and stem traits between the different types of leaf phenology for the most dominant 22 species, classifying them as follows: 10 evergreen, 5 late deciduous, 3 progressively deciduous, and 4 early deciduous species, which in order become leafless earlier in the dry season. Within a 15-ha tree community, where all stems with a diameter at breast height (DBH) ≥ 5 cm were censused prior to this study, at least 48.1% and 23.8% of tree individuals and 41.5% and 38.5% of basal area were of evergreen and deciduous species, respectively. In principal component analysis with seven traits measured, leaf traits appeared along the first axis and stem traits did along the second axis, which together explained 73.8% of the variance. Evergreen species had lower leaf area and leaf nitrogen content, and higher leaf thickness, leaf mass per area, and wood density than early deciduous species. Progressively deciduous and late deciduous species were intermediate between the two extreme types without statistical differences with them. Maximal height and estimated height at 10 cm in DBH had no differences between the four phenological types. In this forest, evergreen species occupied nearly half of the tree community despite the long pronounced dry season. This evergreenness could be attributed to the infertile sandy soil. Our study clarified gradational differences in leaf traits and wood density along with the types of leaf phenology among the dominant tree species, suggesting that finer classification of leaf phenology should help understand interspecific variation in functional traits.