Is Leyland Cypress Deer Resistant?

Updated September 2026 · Garden Advice Guide

Yes, mostly. Leyland cypress is deer resistant in the practical sense that deer rarely strip it the way they strip arborvitae, and browsing lists from land-grant extension programs put it in the "seldom severely damaged" tier rather than the "frequently damaged" tier. It is not deer proof. Hungry deer in a hard winter will eat the soft new growth within about six feet of the ground, and bucks will destroy a young trunk with their antlers no matter how the foliage tastes.

So the honest answer has two parts: the foliage is a low-preference food, and the tree is still very vulnerable for its first three or four years. Leyland is also farmed across the South, where it is the regional answer to a cut tree in zones too warm for fir, and its speed is why growers pick it, as our page on how long it takes to grow a Christmas tree explains. Almost every "the deer killed my Leylands" story is one of those two problems, and they need different fixes.

Check whether Leyland cypress even suits your climate with our free growing zone lookup before you plant a screen of them, because they are hardy in zones 6 through 10 and struggle badly at the cold edge.

How deer resistance is actually rated

The ratings you see repeated everywhere come from a small number of extension programs, mostly Rutgers, Penn State and Cornell, that grade landscape plants on a four-tier scale from watching real browsing over years.

Leyland cypress sits in the B tier. Arborvitae, the tree people usually compare it to, sits in D. That single gap is the strongest argument for Leyland cypress in deer country, and it is a real one: a hedge of eastern arborvitae in a deer corridor gets browsed to a bare stick wall by February, and a Leyland hedge in the same spot usually does not.

But B is not A. B means the plant gets eaten when pressure is high, when the population is dense, when snow covers everything else, or when a young doe has learned the taste from her mother. Deer preference is regional and even herd-specific. What your county extension office reports for your area beats a national list every time.

Three things reduce every rating on that chart:

• Deer density. Above roughly 25 deer per square mile, most B plants start getting hit.
• Season. January and February browsing looks nothing like July browsing.
• New growth. Soft, bright green flushes taste better than hardened foliage on any conifer.

Is Leyland cypress deer resistant in winter?

This is where the answer gets more nuanced, and where most damage happens.

Leyland cypress holds soft, flat, feathery foliage year round. In summer, when there is clover, hosta, tender annuals and every browse plant in the woods available, deer walk right past it. In late winter, when the woods are stripped and snow covers the ground layer, an evergreen at nose height is one of the few green things left.

What you see then is not the total defoliation arborvitae suffers. It is a browse line: the lower branches get nibbled back to woody stems while everything above about five or six feet stays untouched. It looks like someone ran a hedge trimmer along the bottom of the row at deer height.

Three factors decide how bad it gets in your yard:

Herd pressure. Suburban deer with no hunting pressure and a big food supply are pickier. Rural deer in a hard winter are not.

What else is available. A Leyland screen next to a woodlot full of browse is safer than the same screen in a subdivision where every yard has already been eaten.

Tree age. A three-year-old Leyland has almost all of its foliage in the browse zone. A fifteen-year-old Leyland has most of its foliage well overhead, and deer damage becomes a cosmetic issue on the bottom two feet instead of an existential one.

That last point is the practical takeaway. Protect them hard for the first four years and then relax.

What deer damage looks like on Leyland cypress

Two completely different kinds of damage get blamed on browsing, and telling them apart tells you what to do.

Browsing damage has a torn edge. Deer have no upper front teeth, so they grip and tear rather than cutting. Look closely at a damaged tip: a ragged, stringy break means deer, while a clean angled cut means rabbits or a person with pruners.

Antler rubbing is the one that kills trees. In autumn, bucks rub velvet off their antlers and mark territory on young trees with smooth, flexible trunks between about one and four inches thick. A Leyland cypress at planting size is exactly the trunk they prefer. A buck can strip the bark off one side in a single evening, and if he girdles the trunk, the tree dies above that point. No repellent stops this, because he is not eating the tree.

A browse line is survivable. Leyland cypress does not sprout reliably from old bare wood, so branches browsed back to brown stems inside the canopy will not refill from those stems. New growth has to come from the branch tips outside the damage. That means a badly browsed lower section stays thin for years, which is a real problem in a privacy screen where the bottom three feet is the part you cared about.

Protecting young Leyland cypress, ranked by what works

1. Trunk guards, October through December. This is the highest-value hour you will spend. Wrap each young trunk in a plastic spiral guard, corrugated drain tile split lengthwise, or a cylinder of welded wire held off the trunk by stakes, from ground level to about four feet. It costs almost nothing in time and stops the failure mode that actually kills trees. Remove or loosen guards in spring so they do not girdle the growing trunk.

2. Fencing during establishment. A temporary run of 6 to 8 foot plastic mesh deer fencing along the row for the first three winters is the only thing that reliably stops browsing. It is ugly, and it works. A shorter fence set at an angle, or two parallel 4 foot fences a few feet apart, also work, because deer judge depth poorly and dislike jumping into a space they cannot land in cleanly.

3. Repellents, rotated. Egg-based and capsaicin repellents both work, and both stop working when deer get used to them, so alternate products every three or four weeks. Apply on a dry day above 40°F, cover the lower six feet, and reapply after heavy rain and after each new growth flush, since new foliage is unprotected. Repellents do nothing against antler rubbing.

4. Netting the lower canopy. Loose bird netting or burlap over the bottom four feet through winter. Not attractive, effective, and it also reduces winter burn.

5. Interplanting with things deer hate. Planting genuinely unpalatable shrubs in front of the screen adds a soft barrier. Boxwood, Japanese pieris, and most junipers work. Our deer resistant shrubs list has the ones worth using.

What does not work: single strands of fishing line, bar soap hung in branches, human hair, and motion lights. Deer in suburbs get used to all of them within a couple of weeks.

Planting a Leyland screen so deer damage matters less

A well-planted Leyland cypress screen outgrows deer pressure. A badly planted one stays in the browse zone, gets sick, and never closes.

Space them 10 to 12 feet apart. This is the single most ignored number in landscaping. Leyland cypress reaches 15 to 25 feet wide at maturity and 60 to 70 feet tall. Planted at 5 or 6 feet, which nurseries and installers still recommend, the row closes quickly and then declines: inner branches shade out and die, air stops moving through, and Seiridium canker and Cercospora needle blight move in. A staggered double row set 12 feet apart within each row and 8 feet between rows gives you a fast screen without the crowding. Our plant spacing calculator will run the numbers for whatever length of screen you have.

Plant in fall or early spring. Root establishment before summer heat matters more here than most conifers, since Leylands are shallow-rooted and drought-sensitive despite their reputation.

Water deeply through the first two summers. A stressed Leyland is a browsed Leyland, because deer preferentially browse weak plants, and a stressed one also cannot outgrow the damage.

Do not shear them into a formal hedge. Shearing produces a dense outer shell of soft new growth at exactly the height deer feed at, and it means the tree cannot regenerate from the inside when something eats through that shell.

Know the zone limits. Leyland cypress is rated for zones 6 through 10 and is regularly damaged by ice, heavy snow load and winter wind at the cold edge of that range. In zone 6, a screen that survives deer just fine can still split apart in a single ice storm.

Worked example: a 120 foot screen in zone 7 deer country

Say you are in northern Virginia, zone 7a, with a 120 foot property line to screen and a deer trail crossing the back corner. Neighbors' arborvitae are chewed to sticks.

The layout. A staggered double row. Row one gets 10 trees at 12 foot spacing. Row two sits 8 feet behind, offset by 6 feet, with 9 trees. That is 19 trees for 120 feet, and the offset closes visual gaps years before the canopies actually touch.

Year one, spring. Plant 6 foot balled and burlapped stock. Mulch 3 inches deep in a wide ring, keeping mulch off the trunks. Water 10 gallons per tree weekly through the first summer if rain is under an inch.

Year one, September. Install spiral trunk guards on all 19 trunks before the rut. Total time, about 40 minutes.

Year one, November. Run temporary 7 foot mesh deer fencing on the outside of the row, from the property line corner past the deer trail. Start a repellent rotation on the lower foliage: product A in November, product B in December, product A again in January, product B in February.

Years two and three. Same routine. Trees put on 3 to 4 feet a year with decent water, so by the end of year three they are 15 to 18 feet tall with the lowest live foliage at ground level and most of the canopy above 6 feet.

Year four. Pull the fence. Keep the trunk guards on any trunk still under 5 inches thick. Drop the repellent to a single late-January application on the lowest branches.

Expected outcome. Some ragged lower tips each February, invisible from the house. Screen closed by year five or six. Compare that with the ungated version: browse lines on both sides, two trees girdled by bucks in year one, and a screen with permanent bald patches at eye level.

Total ongoing work after year four: essentially none, which is the real advantage of Leyland cypress over a D-rated plant like arborvitae. Deer resistance is not about never being eaten. It is about how many years you have to defend the planting before it defends itself.

Better options if your deer pressure is severe

If your yard is a highway for deer, a plant rated A rather than B is worth considering, and several make better screens than Leyland cypress anyway.

For a fuller comparison of screening conifers and which ones deer genuinely leave alone, see deer resistant evergreens, and for a broader planting list deer resistant plants covers perennials, shrubs and bulbs together. If you want to know what to keep out of the beds near your screen, plants deer love is the list to avoid planting as a snack bar in front of it.

A native deciduous option worth mixing in at the edges is arrowwood viburnum, which handles browsing pressure well and feeds birds.

For research-grade browsing ratings by species, the Rutgers landscape plants rated by deer resistance list is the source most other lists are drawn from.

FAQ

Do deer eat Leyland cypress?

Sometimes, mostly in late winter and mostly on young trees. Leyland cypress is a low-preference food, so deer choose almost anything else first, but a hungry herd will browse the soft lower growth within about six feet of the ground. Established trees over about ten feet tall lose only bottom foliage, which is cosmetic rather than serious.

Is Leyland cypress more deer resistant than arborvitae?

Considerably. Extension browsing lists put Leyland cypress in the "seldom severely damaged" tier and eastern arborvitae in the "frequently severely damaged" tier, which matches what people see in the yard: an arborvitae hedge in a deer corridor gets stripped to bare stems while a Leyland hedge in the same spot keeps most of its foliage. Green Giant arborvitae falls somewhere between the two.

Will a browsed Leyland cypress grow back?

The tips will regrow, but bare interior wood usually will not. Leyland cypress does not reliably resprout from old brown wood, so a branch chewed back past its green foliage stays bare and the gap has to be filled by growth from neighboring branches. Light browsing recovers in a season or two; repeated heavy browsing on a young tree leaves a permanent thin band.

How do I stop bucks from rubbing my Leyland cypress?

Physical barriers only. Wrap each trunk from the ground to four feet with a spiral guard, split drain tile, or a wire cylinder held off the bark, and install it before the rut in early autumn. Repellents do not help, because a buck rubbing a trunk is not tasting it. Once trunks pass about five inches thick, bucks generally lose interest.

How far apart should I plant Leyland cypress?

Ten to twelve feet apart in a single row, or 12 feet within rows and 8 feet between rows in a staggered double row. Closer spacing produces a screen faster and then fails, because crowded trees shade out their own inner branches and invite Seiridium canker and needle blight. Patience here is what makes a screen last thirty years instead of twelve.

Do deer repellents work on evergreens?

Yes, with two conditions. Rotate between two different active types, such as an egg-based product and a capsaicin product, every three to four weeks so deer do not habituate. And reapply after heavy rain and after every new growth flush, since new foliage emerges uncoated. Repellents are a supplement to fencing and trunk guards, not a substitute.

Is Leyland cypress a good choice in heavy deer areas?

It is a reasonable choice, and better than arborvitae, but not the best. If your deer pressure is severe, Norway spruce, Cryptomeria 'Yoshino', eastern red cedar and Nellie Stevens holly all rate higher and make comparable screens. Leyland cypress earns its place mainly on growth speed, adding 3 to 4 feet a year, which shortens the vulnerable period considerably.

Updated September 2026