1E
This is partly born out by the text description in 1E, which makes it sound as if the creature is literally a mound - it's given a base circumference and said to have a "summit". It does have at least two limbs, but the impression given is something that looks more like the tendriculos of 3E than what we see in the illustration. That's a humanoid shape, walking on two legs and composed of a mass of sodden leafy vegetation. The feet are slightly splayed pillars, lacking any toes, although there do seem to be some leafy tendrils where the fingers should be. It has a pair of eyes, but no mouth or other external features except for a curious protuberance where the nose should be. This has annular rings around it, making it look like a cross between an earthworm and a parsnip; it may be a feeding tendril rather than anything involved with breathing or a sense of smell.
The creature moves slowly, as one might expect for something that shambles, and it's specifically stated that the high armour class reflects its tough fibrous composition making it difficult to get a blow deep enough to hit its few vital organs. The hit dice are unusually variable (although always high) suggesting a greater variation in size than the text indicates - or else that they get hit by lightning more frequently than one might expect. The thing is given enough intelligence that it could potentially be sentient - it's the same as an ogre or troll - but there's no indication of any native language.
Which, given that it doesn't have a mouth, isn't really a surprise.
The 2E version is more humanoid in appearance, and looks to be composed of a comparatively solid fibrous green material (which, for what it's worth, more closely resembles Swamp Thing). The conical nature of the torso and head are more apparent and the creature has more clearly defined digits on both the hands and feet. In fact, these seem to end in claws, which one can only assume are really thorns. Leaves and grass sprout from the mound, and could either be a part of the being, or something that's grown on mulch trapped on the body while it was motionless.
There is a mouth this time, as well as a visible neck and a bulbous humanoid nose with two nostrils instead of the previous parsnip-worm. The eyes are small and dark, and clearly don't resemble anything you'd find on a real plant (but then, neither do legs...) In terms of its behaviour, the mound is now solitary, whereas previously they sometimes congregated in groups of two or three.
3E
The shambling mound reverts to a much less humanoid form in this edition. Indeed, beyond having two legs and two arms, there isn't much humanoid about it at all any longer. The lower limbs look bestial, ending in feet with three long grasping toes, almost the opposite of the simple pillars of 1E. The arms are long vine-like tentacles, entirely different in shape to the previous editions, and (as is often the case with plants) asymmetrical and variable in form. There is no head, not any sign of the mouth, nose, or even eyes of the previous editions, just a featureless surface between the "shoulders".
As in 2E, however, the creature does seem to be made of comparatively solid material, and this is reflected in the fact that it attacks by constricting with the tentacles, rather than smothering in compost and slime as it did before. Only the tentacles look to possess any chlorophyll, with the main body perhaps being covered in something bark-like. Allowing for changes in the updated rules, the statistics remain much the same, and the creature is still solitary. It has the same strength as an ogre, which seems reasonable given its size and shape.
5E
The 5E version does not appear to be at all lacking in chlorophyll, and its form is even more amorphous than before. Both the text and the illustration imply something composed of a mass of leaves and vines, closer to the 1E version than the more solid forms of 2E and 3E, although clearly quite distinct. There are no digits on the limbs, just long and heavy creepers in an irregular vegetable form. Similar tendrils arise from the body, and there appear to be three legs, so the overall shape is likely highly variable.
There is a head again, although no discernable neck, and there are no eyes or visible nostrils. There is, however, a mouth, with woody tooth-like projections in the lower jaw, but nothing for them to bite against in the upper. This makes their utility rather dubious (to be fair, there's no indication it's supposed to be able to bite), but perhaps they're used to shovel mud or loose soil out of the way. There seem to be some sort of flowers on the head and, since we're told that the plant is inimical to regular vegetation, they're presumably supposed to be part of it.
The intelligence rating has dropped for the first time, although it still matches the new version of the ogre, so this may be interpreted as a rule change rather than anything inherent. It's far less armoured than before, but this is compensated for by a great increase in hit points - indicating that one can try and hack the body apart, rather than it just ignoring everything as in 1E, but that it's still difficult to do it any permanent injury. Its lack of eyes has more effect than in 3E, with the creature being unable to sense anything beyond its immediate environment and it being impossible to "blind" it.
Despite them both being plants, the shambling mound and the treant have notable biological differences. The most obvious of these is the differing mode of obtaining nutrition. A treant, so far as we can tell, does not eat, gaining its sustenance through its leaves, and through occasionally rooting itself to the ground. Shambling mounds, on the other hand, explicitly do eat. They are, in other words, carnivorous plants, much like a Venus fly trap.In the real world, carnivory has evolved a number of times among plants so, while the ambulatory nature of the shambling mound and the fact that it's nearly as intelligent as a gorilla are clearly don't fit with real-world biology, its diet is entirely plausible. The Venus fly trap is arguably the most sophisticated of the carnivorous plants, but many other types exist, several of which, such as the sundew, capture their prey with adhesive glands on their leaves, which is at least analogous to the mound's ability to smother and entangle its prey.
Sundews, and other carnivorous plants, don't have anything analogous to a mouth, although the Venus fly-trap arguably comes close. Instead, they digest their prey externally, secreting digestive enzymes from their surface, dissolving the victim, and then absorbing the nutrients into the lead surface - which, functionally speaking, is not too different from the way that house flies vomit onto their food and slurp up the resulting juices. The 2E and 5E shambling mounds do appear to have mouths, but the others do not, since it's clear that their body is amorphous enough to engulf and smother a victim without requiring a special organ to do so. Those that do have a mouth probably don't need a stomach, and would surely be able to digest the victim directly from the inside the mouth, and spit out the bones and other indigestible bits when it's done.
Logically, this should take a long time, and one would expect a shambling mound to take several days to fully digest a man-sized corpse. Given that it isn't terribly active most of the time, this is not unreasonable, and we see something similar in large snakes that are rather more fast-moving than the mound appears to be.
How the shambling mound senses its environment is unclear, since the 3E and 5E versions lack eyes. Despite this, the 3E version has not only darkvision (which seems to require eyes in most other instances where we see it) but low-light vision too. The 1E and 2E versions do have eyes, apparently made of vegetable matter in some way. The 5E version is the most plausible here, lacking both regular sight and darkvision; its "blindsight" is probably an ability to sense vibrations and air currents.
In reality, the active nature of the shambling mound would probably require it to have lungs and a circulatory system to power the contractile fibres or whatever else passes for its musculature. Since the thing clearly can't bleed to death - this is the part of the justification for its resistance to injury - it evidently doesn't have blood, and the fact that much of its bodily substance is supposed to be composed of "rotting" vegetation implies that it doesn't breathe much either. Instead, we're left with the idea that the brain is animating the body magically, using a sort of localised telekinesis.
In one sense, the shambling mound is a kind of vegetable undead.
The reason that it isn't truly undead is that the brain - or "root-stem" as 5E calls it - does seem to be an actual living thing. Everything else is just an adjunct built around it, although the original cellular structure must be modified in order to carry out the digestive and sensory functions.
The signature power of the shambling mound is its ability to absorb electrical energy. In 5E (and 4E), this allows it to heal any damage to its body, but in the earlier editions it actually makes it more powerful, temporarily in 3E, but permanently in 1E and 2E, indicating that this might be how the thing grows in those editions. This clearly has to be a magical process, since it's hard to imagine a vegetable battery being able to absorb quite so much energy without catching fire or otherwise being damaged. In the real world, as in most cases in D&D, being struck by lightning is not good for organic life.
In 5E, shambling mounds do not reproduce, and are the result of magic spontaneously animating a regular plant and turning it into a "root-stem" that then accumulates the rest of the body, explaining its rather random form. It's less obvious that this is intended to be the case in earlier editions, although it seems hard to imagine that they go into flower or produce pollen. More likely, if the 5E version is not correct, or at least not universal, shambling mounds would reproduce as ferns do, spreading spores that, after landing in suitable habitat, eventually grow into a new root-stem.
If it's really like a fern, the spore sprouts into a temporary green blob that produces the gametes, which fertilise each other to produce the root-stem proper... but this would be a difficult thing for sages in the world to study. It would also imply that the root-stem has a structure similar to that we'd expect in most seed-bearing plants with thick stems, since, aside from the lack of seeds, ferns are structurally very similar to such plants. For example, it could be somewhat woody, something that moss, for example, is not.
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