[support] Theme inheritance broken

[Scott]

I'm working with a copy of Garland on Drupal 6.9.  Essentially I copied
Garland into ./sites/all/themes/custom/kidsgardens to create my custom
theme.  I created a working site.  I would now like to remove the
template.php and style.css files (at least those parts that belong to
Garland) from this directory and eventually have only my customizations
there.  I named Garland as the base theme in kidsgardens.info and
renamed template.php and style.css (to hide them) expecting them to be
inherited from Garland.  No joy.  The php stops at the call for
phptemplate_get_ie_styles(), the first function call in page.tpl.php.
When I return template.php to my theme directory, the code works but my
css is still gone - until style.css is returned to the directory.

Being new to drupal I suspect I'm missing something fundamental.