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The character 花 (huā): flower

A bank of peonies in front of the pale cream wall of a Chinese courtyard: very double blooms in pink, magenta and cream on dark green foliage, and in the wall a round moon gate opening on a garden, under a roof of green glazed tiles. At the right, on the sunlit wall, the character 花 in deep brown: a bar crossed by two short uprights above, and below two tight parts, the right one ending in a stroke that drops, turns and lifts into a hook.
Pronunciation
huā
Strokes
7
Level
HSK 3
Radical
艸
Made of
艹化

What it means

variant of 花[hua1]; flower; blossom; also pr. [wei3]

Where its shape comes from

This one is not old, and it draws nothing. It is absent from the Shuowen Jiezi: down to the Northern and Southern dynasties a flower was written 華. 花 rests instead on the device that produced the great majority of Chinese characters, one element telling you what is spoken of, the grass 艹 on top, and one telling you how it sounds, 化 huà underneath. The proportion is countable: of the 9,353 characters Xu Shen records, 364 are filed among the pictures and close to 7,700 among the sound compounds.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE), where the character is absent and where the tally of the six categories is set out; the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

A way to remember it

The grass on top: one bar crossed by two short uprights. Beneath it, two pieces pressed tight against each other. The last stroke goes down, turns, runs off to the right and lifts at the end: a single stroke for three directions.

This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.

Words it appears in

Writing it

See the stroke order of 花, animated stroke by stroke.

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