hello all and thanks for replies.

please see pic taken last year, this is roughly how things are at present:

http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/2752/garden1z.th.jpg

as you can see the weed is close to the shrubs, if anything even more so now, so it's not a case of being cack handed, i'm pretty sure spraying that close without protecting the shrubs will damage them?

also by default i'll be spraying the soil due to the weed being extremely low lying so can't really avoid that.

the weedkiller i've bought is a systemic weedkiller concentrate containing glyphosate, it's a 250ml bottle and the box says:

151.4g/l (13.4%w/w) glyphosate as a soluble concentrate.

do you reckon this'll do the trick?