Saffron is the dried stigma of Crocus sativus. Each flower produces three, they must be picked by hand at dawn during a flowering season of a couple of weeks, and it takes somewhere near a hundred and fifty thousand flowers to make a kilogram. There is no mechanised alternative and there has never been one, which is why saffron has been the most expensive spice by weight for as long as anyone has recorded prices.
That is the point of using it as an offering. Burned or strewn or dissolved, saffron is a way of putting something extremely costly beyond recovery, and Persian and Indian ritual use it in exactly that register. It is added to the milk and water poured over images, mixed into sandalwood paste for the mark applied to the forehead, and strewn at shrines.
It is also the dye. The ochre and orange of Buddhist and Hindu renunciate robes is nominally saffron, though in practice the colour is far more often achieved with turmeric, jackfruit wood or ochre, since actual saffron dye at that scale is unaffordable and fades quickly.
The plant is sterile and does not set seed. Every Crocus sativus in the world is a corm division of another, propagated by hand, which makes the entire crop a single very old clone.