Launched three weeks ago, the summer-long Disney Fairies Trail (also running in three NSW botanic gardens) is aimed at young children, who navigate a course around the gardens via a tablet or phone screen on which Disney fairies appear to hover in the garden environment.

Tim Entwisle, director and CEO of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Victoria, says the partnership with the Walt Disney Foundation includes funding for the garden's education program and the donation of iPads. The funding, which Professor Entwisle says he is unable to reveal due to the terms of the agreement, has enabled disadvantaged schools - including Dandenong and Spring Parks primary schools - to visit and take advantage of the app and other activities.

He also hopes it will broaden the garden's visitor demographics.

"We're very much a May Gibbs and Norman Lindsay kind of place rather than Disney and Pixar, so [we are] really trying not to be too elitist about who comes to the gardens and encourage an audience who might not normally know that much about us," Mr Entwisle says.

Keen to develop a comprehensive gardens app that includes detailed plant information, he says the augmented reality Disney app, which includes suggestions for activities when a fairy is "found", ("Try making a fairy front door and porch with sticks and leaves for Tinker Bell") was a short-term way to test the technology.

Fairy costumes and Disney channels are promoted on the app's website and from within the app via a "read more" link. Professor Entwisle says he was unaware of the in-app licensed promotion until alerted to it by Fairfax Media.

Some critics are sceptical of the app's benefits and dubious of its motives. "It's a way of getting behind the guard of parents," says Sharon Beder, an expert in technology in society, and professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. "Parents ... think that something that is happening in the Botanic Garden is a nice, healthy non-commercial pursuit."

Marketing to children is a "deceptive practice," she argues, because primary and preschool children do not have the maturity or development to understand persuasive intent."The Botanic Gardens are selling off children to be marketed to," Professor Beder says.

She also points to paediatric research that shows screen time can damage children's health and development. "They're not actually taking part in their own environment, they're glued to those screens," she says. "It's turning play into a very individual experience, which has consequences for their development in terms of socialising."

Entwisle is enthusiastic about the potential of technology. "Children [are] using screens and accessing the world through them, that's the reality. You then try and use that to get them to connect with nature. If you can find clever ways to do that, all the better."

He acknowledges the app's content is "pretty basic" but says, "you have to keep these things very simple to make them work. As soon as you add too much content, people get bored."

An expert in colonial gardens, retired historian Paul Fox, is also enthusiastic about the potential of an app in the garden, but describes the Disney Fairies Trail as "outrageous".

"I am utterly, utterly gobsmacked by the lack of creativity," he says "It's a travesty being visited on the children in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens."

That virtually the same trail is operating in four Australian botanic gardens, is damaging to the Melbourne garden's brand and a missed opportunity for the local games industry, Mr Fox argues.

"This is a dumb copy-cat system," he says. "The gardens are about genius loci [spirit of place]. This is about international commercialism that can be rolled out anywhere … [Disney] are laughing all the way because they've got an entree into a respected public institution."

A Disney spokeswoman did not respond to critics' specific claims but said the partnership's aim was "to give families extra motivation to visit the gardens, learn more about their plants and deepen their connection with nature".