This is looking east. Notice the glorious corrugated plastic privacy screens.
You can see through the shrubs a little bit on the left. Last weekend I took out a juniper that was growing entirely within some other plants. It all looked really, really bad.
It seems the previous owners' goal was to have dense, tall greenery running parallel to the patio for privacy. Notice the green shrubbery obscuring the rest of the tree trunk and the rest of the backyard. It was pretty thick on the left side of the tree, too, before I started pruning last weekend. (Why are the people here obsessed with privacy? The landscape architecture student who designed my xeriscaping is convinced the previous owners were nudists.)
Okay, so here's what it looks like now (sorry I didn't get the same shots):
