The water cycle

The water cycle, or hydrologic cycle, is driven by the Sun’s energy. The sun warms
the ocean surface and other surface water, causing liquid water to evaporate and ice to
sublime—turn directly from a solid to a gas. These sun-driven processes move water
into the atmosphere in the form of water vapor.
Over time, water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into clouds and eventually falls
as precipitation, rain or snow. When precipitation reaches Earth's surface, it has a few
options: it may evaporate again, flow over the surface, infiltrate into the
soil, or percolate—sink down—into the ground.
In land-based, or terrestrial, ecosystems in their natural state, rain usually hits the
leaves and other surfaces of plants before it reaches the soil. Some water evaporates
quickly from the surfaces of the plants. The water that's left reaches the soil and, in
most cases, will begin to move down into it.
In general, water moves along the surface as runoff only when the soil is
saturated with water, when rain is falling very hard, or when the surface can't
absorb much water. A non-absorbent surface could be rock in a natural
ecosystem or asphalt or cement in an urban or suburban ecosystem.

Water in the upper levels of the soil can be taken up by plant roots. Plants use
some of the water for their own metabolism, and water that's in plant tissues
can find its way into animals’ bodies when the plants get eaten. However, most
of the water that enters a plant's body will be lost back to the atmosphere in a
process called transpiration. In transpiration, water enters through the roots,
travels upwards through vascular tubes made out of dead cells, and evaporates
through pores called stomata found in the leaves.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/ecology/biogeochemical-cycles/a/the-water-cycle