Charles Downing was born in 1802 in Newburgh, New York. He was educated in local schools, and from his teenage years on he assisted his father, Samuel Downing, in his nursery business. Upon his father's death in 1822, he took over the operation of the nursery. He entered into partnership with his younger brother (famed landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing) in 1835, and they continued in business together four years. In 1839, Charles Downing sold out his interest in the family business and started his own nursery. About 1850, he gave up the business entirely and the rest of his life was devoted to research and experimentation on fruit varieties. He developed a test orchard which contained 1,800 varieties of apples and 1,000 varieties of pears. With his brother he prepared The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (first published in 1845) and after Andrew's death in 1852 he continued to revise and expand the book. Too shy to ever give a speech, Downing did write many articles and was internationally recognized as an authority on pomology. He died in 1885.

This collection (1851-1900, undated) contains Charles Downing's notes on numerous varieties of pears, plums and cherries. These include sketches of the fruit; notations on color, fruit shape, and habit; and sometimes notations on the yield of the variety in a particular year. There are also occasional news clippings and portions of letters from others scattered throughout the books; these, too, describe the characteristics of fruits. Correspondents are J. Battey, G. B. Brackett, John Milton Earle, A. Foote, and Ch. Gilbert. In some cases later notes (such as updated names for the different varieties) were penciled in, presumably by Professor J. L. Budd or other members of the Horticulture Department at Iowa State College (University).

These notes came to the library through Professor Joseph Lancaster Budd, Head of the Horticulture Department at Iowa State from 1877 to 1899, who was also a prominent pomologist. Downing willed his notes and his horticultural library to Budd, with the stipulation that these items would come to the Iowa State College (University) Library when Budd had no further need of them. The notes were added to the Library's collection in 1930 and were placed into notebooks.