Well that didn't take long. If I look at my records I can see the Irises flowered on the 21st of February, and I "dead headed" the last of them today, eight days later. I guess they flowered for about 2% of the year.
I guess the plan is to have LOTS of bulbs that flower at different times, the crocuses are still going strong, but I suspect they only have a few days left in them. It seems somehow fake or as though they don't count, keeping them in pots in the greenhouse. The few wild ones in the garden that somehow survived the gardener who's idea of gardening seemed to be pouring weedkiller over everything and digging up all the bulbs. Those ones that pushed up through the overgrown borders somehow seem more real.
I didn't really know how bulbs worked to be honest. Flowers I understand, they grow, get pollinated, die or dry out and leave seeds behind. You grab the seeds, plant them and, well, new flowers.
Bulbs keep coming back, and I wasn't sure where the whole seed part came from. Turns out, you have one bulb, all the nutrients and so on in the bulb go into growing leaves and the flower. The flower dies, and the leave stick around for a while. The important part is they draw energy from the sun, etc. etc. enough to send all the nutrients, and more back into the bulb, enough to survive until next year and maybe even spawn a couple more bulbs, and so they spread.
As I write this now I realised I still don't really know the roll the flower plays in all this, I guess seeds are involved somehow.
Anyway, the Iris grew, and as the flowers started to wilt and die I cut them off. So now I have a stack of flowers I can attempt to turn into actual dye, and a bunch of bulbs I can stick in the cleared border now I know what they look like and where I'm going to put them, so they can just hang out until next year, and I'll know not to pull them up.