Years ago, some of this got into my lawn from the heavy equipment used by a tree cutting service. Ever since I struggled to reduce it there and other areas where it spread. Meanwhile, a few years ago I transplanted a bunch far from the lawn, where I thought it would look good. The photo is from the transplant. Even after a few years, it looks and acts amazingly different between transplant and volunteer. There is quite a lot of each, and the volunteers are in more and more places and all volunteers look the same:
Volunteers have a range of changing leaf colors throughout the season, with various shades of red and green. Transplants have green leaves. Volunteers have tall purple flowers. Transplants have shorter blue flowers. Volunteers' leaves stay green and red long after the spring flowers vanish. Transplants' leaves turn brown and fall off long before the end of summer and are bare ground until next spring. Volunteers send out rapid growing red runners under grass or other plants, then take root in distant points, where leaves spurt upward then lay down on top of surrounding plants smothering them. Transplants need tending to avoid being choked out by grass and never expand.
I'm really sure it is the same plant. Must be a soil difference, combined with my usual jinx that plants I try to grow don't.
