Anybody knowledgeable about daffodils?

[senua]

We all know the prevailing advice about not cutting back daffodil leaves after flowering so the bulb can store energy for next year’s flowers. But does anybody know the chapter and verse on this? – quite often scientific advice gets distorted or misappropriated and I wondered if this has happened to daffodils.
For example, we are told to consume 2 litres a day if we want to be properly hydrated. This has morphed into ‘we should drink 2L a day’ but this is a distortion. Some of our liquid intake comes from food (esp things like soup, melon, etc) so we don’t need to take in a whole extra 2L by means of drinking.

So, back to daffodils: how much difference does it make leaving the leaves - is the effect marginal but has been talked up by some zealous journalist? Is most of the effect achieved within the first (say) two weeks and we might as well cut after that?
As you may guess, I have some daffodil leaves I want to cut down. What is the actual chapter and verse on the scientific research (as opposed to "a TV presenter/ my NDN's cousin said")

you need to give tem about 6 weeks after they flower. This should be about the same time as leave start to look yellow.

This builds bulb for next year, so you get flowers next year.
If you are not interested in having them next year, eg you have them in a pot and just buy new bulbs, then no need to leave the leaves.

If you wnat to replant the pot, you can stick the daffs in a corner of the veg patch, heeled in, to let them finish growing, but this isn't ideal

Folding the leaves and tying with an elastic band is not great as it restricts the ability of the leaves to get sunlight and photosynthesis

Tulips are a different kettle of fish. This isn’t their native climate and they don’t do well, they usually flower once before the weather kills them. If they do manage to flower a second time the flower is tiny. There are only a very few species tulips that will reliably come back every year in the UK.

I've got some tulips ('ordinary' tall ones) which have come back well for a couple of years so far. I have fed them and left the leaves to do their thing, and also watered in the dry springs. They're actually just large potfuls bought near to flowering from the local nursery, one of which I planted but the other two just got plonked on the bed and I didn't get round to trying to dig holes deep enough (lots of roots and stones). Maybe being raised gives them very good drainage which helps?
The pink ones, which were bigger, have gone over but I wouldn't call these 'tiny'.

No its not a myth about leaving the foliage to die back. Heres the advice from the RHS, who are a pretty reputable organisation.

www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=91

I too have tulips which have survived years, flowering every year with no diminution in flower size - in my case, tall red ones given to me by MIL who died 20 years ago. They're slowly decreasing - I now have 3 from the original 6. Clay soil, so good drainage is not the reason! The last three yeas I have a tall pinkish one flowering in the hedge - no idea where that came from!

No its not a myth about leaving the foliage to die back. Here's the advice from the RHS, who are a pretty reputable organisation.
I'm not saying it's a myth. I'm asking if it is a relevant rule for your average gardener or a council of perfection for daffodil geeks. For example my gardening book says that you should always brush the lawn with a besom before mowing - I don't know about you but I don't often follow that rule, despite the guidance.

I would say that the logic behind it is strong enough for it to be worth following. Whereas the rule about deadheading in my experience can be ignored because the amount of energy diverted into seed production is small compared with the amount of "lost" energy from chopping the leaves off after flowering.

I had a lightbulb moment - someone asked "why do you leave two half-leaves on a cutting, why not just take a whole leaf off?" and someone replied "I work in a nursery - when you're doing trays of cuttings, it's quicker just to cut the top two leaves in half", and I realised that a lot of traditional garden knowledge has come from the perspective of large gardens and from gardens where maximising yield is important and there's an abundance of labour. In my context, labour is far from abundant, and I don't need maximum yield - 80% will be more than enough. So I experiment to see how far I can push the boundaries.

But I haven't experimented with removing daffodil leaves. partly because they're quicker to remove when rotting.

I do deadhead daffs because they look rather messy and sad IMO, whereas eg grape hyacinth or iris seedheads can look quite attractive. Or very attractive in the case of ornamental onions.