Discussed several methods of pretreatment for the determination of selenium were discussed, and a program temperature-controlled graphite digestion method was developed to digest 5 kinds of representative standard plant samples of citrus leaves, tea, cabbage leaves, shrubs and rice. The effect of the pretreatment method of digestion solution, digestion temperature and digestion time on the extraction of selenium was investigated in detail. The instrumental working parameters were optimized. For the reaction conditions of hydride generation atomic fluorescence spectrometry (HG-AFS), the effect of the concentration of KBH4 and HCl on the determination of selenium was emphasized. Not only the effect of the concentration of carrier fiow HCl was considered, but also the effect of the concentration of sample HCl on the determination of selenium was studied. The best method for determination of trace selenium in plant samples by atomic fluorescence spectrometry with program temperature-controlled graphite digestion was established. Results indicated that the recovery of the method of selenium was 87.1%～106.2%, the detection limit was 0.018 μg·L-1 and the relative standard deviation (RSD) was less than 6.0%. In the range of 0～10 μg·L-1 (low standard) and 0～100 μg·L-1 (high standard) fluorescence was linearly related to the concentration of selenium, the coefficient of r was 0.999 9 and r was 0.999 7. Therefore, this method has wide linear range, high sensitivity, low detection limit and good stability, which was very suitable for the determination of trace selenium of plant. And the method was of easy and safe operation, strong practicability, low cost, and low toxicity of chemicals used, so it can be used as a routine analysis method in general laboratory.