LONDON — Camilla Parker Bowles could not be more different from Diana, Princess of Wales.

Where Prince Charles' first wife had glamour and magnetism that made her one of the great icons of our age, Parker Bowles seems more at ease tending to a country garden than the luminaries of the social circuit.

It's one of the things that binds her to husband-to-be Prince Charles -- both have a passion for the peace of rural life, riding after the hounds and taking long walks.

Despite her discreet manner, Parker Bowles was once widely vilified in Britain.

Diana called her a "Rottweiler.'' The tabloid press dubbed her "the other woman.'' As details of her relationship with Charles emerged in 1992, irate shoppers at a supermarket pelted her with bread rolls.

But since Diana's death in a 1997 Paris car crash, the public has gradually come to accept her as Charles' consort -- no doubt a major factor in clearing the way for their marriage.

She was born Camilla Shand in London on July 17, 1947, and grew up on a country estate in southern England, a granddaughter of the 3rd Baron of Ashcombe. It was an upbringing that made her very much at home in the upper-class circles of the rural rich.

After attending Queen's Gate School in London's exclusive South Kensington district and finishing schools in Switzerland, she "came out'' socially as a debutante in 1965.

Her great-grandmother Alice Keppel had a love affair with King Edward VII, Prince Charles' great-great-grandfather. The young Camilla is said to have brought that up after meeting the prince at a polo match in the early 1970s.

"My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress. So how about it?'' she is reported to have told the prince.

Romance blossomed, but the relationship cooled after Prince Charles went to sea as a naval officer. Shand married cavalry officer Maj. Andrew Parker Bowles and had a son and daughter, Tom and Laura, in the 1970s.

But Charles and his former love remained close friends, even after his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer.

After Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, Parker Bowles made a few tentative steps out of the shadows and into the prince's life. The attempt to find public acceptance was suspended in the national trauma over Diana's death but resumed and slowly succeeded.

Newspapers began to note that Parker Bowles, so unlike Diana and even Charles, was very discreet and never could be lured into commenting on the royal marriage breakup.

This and the fact that she clearly had no interest in fame and celebrity went some way to winning a degree of public acceptance.

The announcement that she will not become Queen when Charles becomes King is probably an indication that both accept divisions in public feeling over the acceptability of a divorced woman with that title.

And in the future bride's wish to be referred to as the Duchess of Cornwall, not the Princess of Wales, there may be a tacit understanding that the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, will remain respected.