茶

Grass radical on top is the side-form of 艸, marking 茶 as a plant. It indexes 茶 in the botanical family with 花 flower, 草 grass, 苹 apple, 菜 vegetable. The radical immediately tells you that this is a leaf, not a tree — fitting for tea, which is harvested from low evergreen shrubs.

Middle is 人 'person', a pictograph of a figure with two legs. In 茶 it works as a semantic marker — a person plucking — and also visually as a small canopy capping the tree below. The original graph 荼 (a related plant name) had a fuller shape; 茶 trimmed it down, leaving the person clearly perched between leaf and tree.

Bottom is 木 'tree' — the tea bush itself, low and woody. Together the three pieces tell a story: grass on top, a person reaching, a tree below — leaves being plucked from a tea shrub. 茶 is a compound ideograph rather than phonetic; the meaning is built directly into the picture.