Gladiolus venustus grows five or six leaves. Most of them are basal, while the couple of stem-leaves are shorter than the rest. Leaf-tip height varies from at least the base of the inflorescence to slightly above it.
The leaves are about 4 mm wide, their midribs slightly raised, the margins not. This results in a nearly diamond shape of the leaf in cross-section (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; Manning and Goldblatt, 1998; iNaturalist).