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.