The growth-defense trade-off is one of important concepts to understand functional diversity among plant species. Defense of their leaves against attackers requires resource investments, leading to a reduction in the growth rate. So far, growth-defense trade-off has been discussed on hervivory, but studies on interspecific variations in defense to pathogen infection have been scarse. This is mainly because most of host-pathogen relationships are species-specific. In our lab, we developed an experimental system to assess pathogen resistance using a generalist fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (unpublished). We showed that, when infection was conducted on the leaf epidermis,  pathogen resistance was well correlated with leaf traits such as leaf mass per area (LMA) among angiosperm species (unpublished). This suggests that pathogen resistance is related to leaf economics spectrum. In the present study, we studied pathogen resistance of gymnosperm species. Our results demonstrate that pathogen resistance among gymnosperm species was not correlated with LMA. Pathogen resistance through leaf epidermis was strongly correlated with pathogen resistance through cut-surface of leaf discs, suggesting that pathogen resistance in gymnosperm species is associated with chemical defense inside leaves rather than leaf structure.