There are three ponds, and the park is named after them. Kanagawa prefecture's account says they were dug as irrigation reservoirs in the Edo period, holding water for the fields around Tsurumi. They now sit inside a park of 29.7 hectares in the north of Yokohama, which is a working-class part of the city that visitors rarely reach.

The cherry trees are counted twice and the counts disagree. The prefecture gives 78 varieties and around 1,600 trees. The park association that runs the site gives 70 varieties and over 1,000.

Both numbers say the same thing, which is that the variety count is unusually high for a park of this size, whichever figure you take.

Seventy-odd varieties means the flowering is not an event but a range: something opening in February at one end, something else in late April at the other, and no single weekend that holds all of it. It also means the park never looks the way a Somei-yoshino park looks, all one colour on one weekend. Ponds dug to keep water on the land now spend April holding the reflection of what grew up around them. The timing given on this page is not either body's; no average peak is published for the park, so it comes from the weather record for Yokohama.