Two trees were the woods — so three trees are the deep forest, trees as far as the eye can see. The pattern runs through the whole script: 人 person, 众 crowd; 火 fire, 炎 blaze. Once you know the pieces, whole families of characters open at a glance.
A piece of culture
Writing that multiplies Chinese never developed an alphabet — it grew a construction kit instead. Around 200 basic drawings (you now know many) combine into tens of thousands of characters, and repetition is its simplest grammar: double a drawing to strengthen it, triple it to make it vast. A dictionary from 1716, the Kangxi dictionary, ordered 47,000 characters this way — by the building blocks inside them, called radicals. You are learning to read the way that dictionary thinks.